with contempt. The anarchists go one step
further. Bakunin proclaims that 'we reject all legislation, all
authority, and all influence, even when it has proceeded from universal
suffrage.' These powerful movements, opposed as they are to each other,
agree in spurning the very idea of democracy, which Lord Morley defines
as government by public opinion, and which may be defined with more
precision as direct government by the votes of the majority among the
adult members of a nation. Even a political philosopher like Mr. Lowes
Dickinson says, 'For my part, I am no democrat.'

Who then are the friends of this _curieux fetiche_, as Quinet called
democracy? It appears to have none, though it has been the subject of
fatuous laudation ever since the time of Rousseau. The Americans burn
incense before it, but they are themselves ruled by the Boss and the
Trust.

The attempt to justify the labour movement as a legitimate development
of the old democratic Liberalism is futile. Freedom to form
combinations is no doubt a logical application of _laisser faire_; and
the anarchic possibilities latent in _laisser faire_ have been made
plain in the anti-democratic movements of labour. But Liberalism rested
on a too favourable estimate of human nature and on a belief in the law
of progress. As there is no law of progress, and as civilised society is
being destroyed by the evil passions of men, Liberalism is, for the
time, quite discredited. It would also be true to say that there is a
fundamental contradiction between the two dogmas of Liberalism. These
were, that unlimited competition is stimulating to the competitors and
good for the country, and that every individual is an end, not a means.
Both are anarchical; but the first logically issues in individualistic
anarchy, the last in communistic anarchy. The economic and the ethical
theory of Liberalism cannot be harmonised. The result--cruel competition
tempered by an artificial process of counter-selection in favour of the
unfittest--was by no means satisfactory. But it was better than what we
are now threatened with.

That the labour movement is economically rotten it is easy to prove. In
the words of Professor Hearnshaw, 'the government has ceased to govern
in the world of labour, and has been compelled, instead of governing, to
bribe, to cajole, to beg, to grovel. It has purchased brief truces at
the cost of increasing levies of Danegeld drawn from the diminishing
resources of t