at all affects. In proportion as rational interests
predominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above all
others, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by his
action, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worse
and more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds in
justice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he should
be doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, conscious
effort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform:
only selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtue
which would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, in
expressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is a
condition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, and
hates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted to
secure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt to
think him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knows
that it was the force of circumstances and a certain pathetic
helplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors.

[Sidenote: People jealous of eminence.]

These errors, when they are committed by a weak and passionate ruler,
are not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligence
he probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is very
likely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see in
every calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests are
radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so.
Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they
clamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it.
Democratic government is founded on the decay of representative
eminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely
because they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous
action would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control.
Men of talent may be needed and used in a democratic state; they may be
occasionally _hired_; but they will be closely watched and directed by
the people, who fear otherwise to suffer the penalty of foolishly
intrusting their affairs to other men's hands.

A fool, says a Spanish proverb, knows more at home than a wise man at
his neighbour's. So democratic instinct assumes that, unless all those
concerned keep a vigilant eye on