more clearly than
Tocqueville the contact of democracy with socialism, his judgment is
untinged with Tocqueville's despondency, and he contemplates the
direction of progress with a confidence that approaches optimism. The
notion of an inflexible logic in history does not depress him, for he
concerns himself with facts and with men more than with doctrines, and
his book is a history of several democracies, not of democracy. There
are links in the argument, there are phases of development which he
leaves unnoticed, because his object has not been to trace out the
properties and the connection of ideas, but to explain the results of
experience. We should consult his pages, probably, without effect, if we
wished to follow the origin and sequence of the democratic dogmas, that
all men are equal; that speech and thought are free; that each
generation is a law to itself only; that there shall be no endowments,
no entails, no primogeniture; that the people are sovereign; that the
people can do no wrong. The great mass of those who, of necessity, are
interested in practical politics have no such antiquarian curiosity.
They want to know what can be learned from the countries where the
democratic experiments have been tried; but they do not care to be told
how M. Waddington has emended the _Monumentum Ancyranum_, what
connection there was between Mariana and Milton, or between Penn and
Rousseau, or who invented the proverb _Vox Populi Vox Dei_. Sir Erskine
May's reluctance to deal with matters speculative and doctrinal, and to
devote his space to the mere literary history of politics, has made his
touch somewhat uncertain in treating of the political action of
Christianity, perhaps the most complex and comprehensive question that
can embarrass a historian. He disparages the influence of the mediaeval
Church on nations just emerging from a barbarous paganism, and he exalts
it when it had become associated with despotism and persecution. He
insists on the liberating action of the Reformation in the sixteenth
century, when it gave a stimulus to absolutism; and he is slow to
recognise, in the enthusiasm and violence of the sects in the
seventeenth, the most potent agency ever brought to bear on democratic
history. The omission of America creates a void between 1660 and 1789,
and leaves much unexplained in the revolutionary movement of the last
hundred years, which is the central problem of the book. But if some
things are missed from t