Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/509

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THE DESPOTISM OF DEMOCRACY.
495

irresponsible many. Wisdom and virtue do not increase with the multiplication of the greed and ignorance intrusted with the management of an important and difficult enterprise. Forty millions of despots under the hierarchy of other despots trying to force thirty millions of subjects under the same debasing rule, to live a life not their own and to contribute money to a use they have no interest in, is just as much a form of feudalism as the government of a Bourbon prince or of a council of Spartan ephors.[1] It is just as certain to evoke the same evils and stir up the same revolt that have overthrown every other despotism.

Ignored as this truth has been and still is in speculation and practice, it has been tacitly recognized and acted upon. That is why the tyranny of the majority has been branded as no better than the tyranny of the minority; why publicists from Aristotle to Mill and Spencer have declaimed against its perils; why so much has been done in contravention of the belief that progress is to be sought through an increase of these perils; why scheme after scheme for the selection of representatives, for the restriction of legislatures, for the appointment of officials, and for the prevention of extravagance and fraud, have been invented; why every one of them has failed, and must inevitably fail. The virtue of human wit is not greater than the virtue of human character. A system of regulation can not be devised that will not yield to some plan to subvert it.[2] "If, in Greece," says Polybius, describing an experience constantly duplicated in modern democracies, "the state intrusts to any one only a talent, and if it has ten checking clerks, and as many seals, and twice as many witnesses, it can not insure his honesty."[3] But with character any political system


  1. Here we have an explanation of Mill's statement (Liberty, Ticknor and Fields edition, pp. 135, 136) that "the spirit of improvement is not always the spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people." He adds very truly that "the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centers of improvement as there are individuals."
  2. One example is the Raines law and its amendments, which led to the invention of the Raines hotel and clubs to circumvent the legislator. Another example is the new German bourse or anti-option law that the corn and produce merchants of Berlin have, according to a cablegram in the Evening Post of May 13th, discovered ways to evade.
  3. Quoted by May, Democracy in Europe, vol. i, p. 126. "The number of defalcations of county treasurers," says Mr. Roberts, Comptroller of New York (Annual Report, 1897, p. li), "brought to my attention induced me to inquire of every county clerk in the State as to whether there had been any defaulting treasurer in his county of late years. The replies received show defalcations or shortages in twenty-three counties. In some cases there was one; in some two; and in one several." Referring to "internal improvements" and other business enterprises in the United States, Prof. John W. Million says, in his State Aid to Railroads in Missouri, p. 30: "There is not a single case in the whole list of the States attempting the construction or the assistance in the construction of public works between 1825 and 1840 in which there is evidence of commanding administrative ability. In the case of almost all there is an absence of what can be called immaculate honesty." In his