y will." It has come to this at
last: that the phrase "she has a will of her own," or "he has a will
of his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and
self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, if
brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury,
and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest
challenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken,
untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the
indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful"
and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most
diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens's
instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than when
he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble," knowing that if he
carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked.
The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which will
carry the best of us to any extremity. We will allow a village of
Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest life they
please among themselves without molestation; but let one of them slay
an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation, and
straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying, shooting and
shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as we may leave
are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face. In
the committee room of a local council or city corporation, the humblest
employees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harsh
treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays are pleaded
for, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner provided
only the employee, however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker,
is hat in hand. But let the most obvious measure of justice be demanded
by the secretary of a Trade Union in terms which omit all expressions
of subservience, and it is with the greatest difficulty that the
cooler-headed can defeat angry motions that the letter be thrown into
the waste paper basket and the committee proceed to the next business.

The Demagogue's Opportunity

And the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his will
without respect for the will of others. Democracy is in practice nothing
but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to arbitrary
authority. He will not vote