e for the future,
regardless of public faith and of national honour, extravagant and
inconstant, jealous of talent and of knowledge, indifferent to justice
but servile towards opinion, incapable of organisation, impatient of
authority, averse from obedience, hostile to religion and to established
law. Evidence indeed abounds, even if the true cause be not proved. But
it is not to these symptoms that we must impute the permanent danger and
the irrepressible conflict. As much might be made good against monarchy,
and an unsympathising reasoner might in the same way argue that religion
is intolerant, that conscience makes cowards, that piety rejoices in
fraud. Recent experience has added little to the observations of those
who witnessed the decline after Pericles, of Thucydides, Aristophanes,
Plato, and of the writer whose brilliant tract against the Athenian
Republic is printed among the works of Xenophon. The manifest, the
avowed difficulty is that democracy, no less than monarchy or
aristocracy, sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives, with
an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain, to
override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and
deviation, and to secure, by Plebiscite, Referendum, or Caucus, free
play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle, that
none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall
be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic
principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not
like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what
it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every man's free
will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free
will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing. Religious
toleration, judicial independence, dread of centralisation, jealousy of
State interference, become obstacles to freedom instead of safeguards,
when the centralised force of the State is wielded by the hands of the
people. Democracy claims to be not only supreme, without authority
above, but absolute, without independence below; to be its own master,
not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new
one, who may be flattered and deceived, but whom it is impossible to
corrupt or to resist, and to whom must be rendered the things that are
Caesar's and also the things that are God's. The enemy to be overcom