e is
no longer the absolutism of the State, but the liberty of the subject.
Nothing is more significant than the relish with which Ferrari, the most
powerful democratic writer since Rousseau, enumerates the merits of
tyrants, and prefers devils to saints in the interest of the community.

For the old notions of civil liberty and of social order did not benefit
the masses of the people. Wealth increased, without relieving their
wants. The progress of knowledge left them in abject ignorance. Religion
flourished, but failed to reach them. Society, whose laws were made by
the upper class alone, announced that the best thing for the poor is not
to be born, and the next best, to die in childhood, and suffered them to
live in misery and crime and pain. As surely as the long reign of the
rich has been employed in promoting the accumulation of wealth, the
advent of the poor to power will be followed by schemes for diffusing
it. Seeing how little was done by the wisdom of former times for
education and public health, for insurance, association, and savings,
for the protection of labour against the law of self-interest, and how
much has been accomplished in this generation, there is reason in the
fixed belief that a great change was needed, and that democracy has not
striven in vain. Liberty, for the mass, is not happiness; and
institutions are not an end but a means. The thing they seek is a force
sufficient to sweep away scruples and the obstacle of rival interests,
and, in some degree, to better their condition. They mean that the
strong hand that heretofore has formed great States, protected
religions, and defended the independence of nations, shall help them by
preserving life, and endowing it for them with some, at least, of the
things men live for. That is the notorious danger of modern democracy.
That is also its purpose and its strength. And against this threatening
power the weapons that struck down other despots do not avail. The
greatest happiness principle positively confirms it. The principle of
equality, besides being as easily applied to property as to power,
opposes the existence of persons or groups of persons exempt from the
common law, and independent of the common will; and the principle, that
authority is a matter of contract, may hold good against kings, but not
against the sovereign people, because a contract implies two parties.

If we have not done more than the ancients to develop and to examine the
dis