who hears his
children cry for more bread? There will be, I fear, spoliation. The
spoliation will increase the distress; the distress will produce fresh
spoliation. There is nothing to stop you; your Constitution is all sail
and no anchor. Either civilization or liberty will perish. Either some
Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong
hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by
barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in
the fifth."

I do not deny that there is great force in Macaulay's reasoning and
prophecy. History points to decline and ruin when public virtue has fled
and government is in the hands of demagogues; for their reign has ever
been succeeded by military usurpers who have preserved civilization
indeed, but at the expense of liberty. Yet this reasoning applies not
only to America but to England as well,--especially since, by the Reform
Bill and subsequent enactments of Parliament, she has opened the gates
to an increase of suffrage, which now threatens to become universal. The
enfranchisement of the people--the enlarged powers of the individual
under the protection and control of the commonwealth--is the Anglo-Saxon
contribution to progress. It is dangerous. So is all power until its use
is learned. But there is no backward step possible; the tremendous
experiment must go forward, for England and America alike.

Macaulay himself was one of the most prominent of English statesmen and
orators, in 1830, 1831, and 1832, to advocate the extension of the right
of suffrage and the increase of popular liberties. All his writings are
on the side of liberty in England; and all are in opposition to the
Toryism which was so triumphant during the reign of George III. Why did
he have faith in the English people of England, and yet show so little
in the English people of America? He believed in political and social
progress for his own countrymen; why should he doubt the utility of the
same in other countries? If vandalism is to be the fate of America,
where education, the only truly conservative element, is more diffused
than in England, why should it not equally triumph in that country when
the masses have gained political power, as they surely will at some
time, and even speedily, if the policy inaugurated by Gladstone is to
triumph? For England Macaulay had unbounded hope, because he believed in
progress,--in liberty, in education, in the civi