tervention on the part of the State to
restore public morality, action for the suppression of alcoholism,
gambling and pornography.

Beyond the fact that his argument savours of reaction, for it recalls to
us the programme of "moral order" of 1873, we must remark, as indeed M.
Fouillee himself acknowledges, that the democratic State can hardly
afford to kill the thing which enables it to live, to destroy its
principal source of revenue. Democracy, as its most authoritative
representatives have admitted, is not a cheap form of government. It has
always been instituted with the hope, and partly with the expressed
design, of being an economical government, and it has always been
ruinous, because it requires a much larger number of partisans than
other forms of government, and a smaller number of malcontents than
other forms of government, and these partisans have to be remunerated in
one fashion or another and the malcontents have to be silenced and
bought in one way or another.

Democracy, whether ancient or modern, lives always in terror of tyrants
who are always imminent or thought by it to be imminent. Against this
possible tyrant who would govern with an energetic minority, the
democracy requires an immense majority which it has to bind to it by the
grant of many favours; it has also to detach from this tyrant the
malcontents who would be his supporters if it did not disarm them by a
still more lavish distribution of favours.

Democracy requires therefore plenty of money. It will find this by
despoiling the wealthy as much as possible; but this is a very limited
source of revenue, for the wealthy are not a numerous class. It will
find it more easily, more abundantly also, by exploiting the vices of
all, for all is a very numerous group. Hence the complaisance shown to
drinking shops, which, as M. Fouillee remarks, it would be more
dangerous for the Government to close than to close the churches. As the
needs of the Government increase, as M. Fouillee predicts, without much
doubt it will claim a monopoly in houses of ill-fame and in the
publication of indecent literature; enterprises in which there would be
money. And after all, tolerating such things for the profit of certain
traders and annexing them to be worked for the profit of the State, is
surely much the same thing from a moral point of view. And the financial
operation would be much more beneficent in the second case than in the
first.

M. Fouillee also a