IV.
"The really alarming feature connected with the growth of democracy," says Mr. Godkin, apparently astonished at this natural and inevitable abuse of power, "is that it does not seem to make adequate provision for the government of this new world [of modern industry]. Its chief function, like the chief function of the monarchy which it has succeeded," he adds, showing an unconscious recognition of the cause of the evil, "is to fill offices."[1] But what other form of despotism has ever made adequate provision for anything beyond the preservation of order and the prevention of aggression? Has not the government of the one tried it and—failed? Has not the government of the few tried it and—failed? Let the moral, intellectual, and industrial history of every country on the face of the earth answer. For centuries despotism, either autocratic or aristocratic, strove in the interest of self-preservation to regulate the beliefs of men. Even the portly volumes of Dr. White on The Warfare of Science scarcely suffice to record its incalculable harm. It made cowards, hypocrites, and martyrs. It drove virtuous and industrious populations from their homes, crippling forever Protestant France and the Spanish Netherlands. Never has it laid its fingers on any enterprise, whether its motives be greed or virtue, without blighting it like a plague, and summoning, like an evil spirit, all the malevolence that war has planted in the human heart. "The first inevitable consequence was," says Buckle, recounting its attempts to regulate trade, "that in every part of Europe there sprang into existence numerous and powerful gangs of smugglers, who lived by disobeying the laws which their ignorant rulers had imposed. These men, desperate from the fear of punishment, and accustomed to the commission of every crime, contaminated the surrounding population; introduced into peaceful villages vices formerly unknown; caused the ruin of entire families; spread, wherever they came, drunkenness, theft, and dissoluteness; and familiarized their associates with those coarse and swinish bebaucheries which were the natural habits of so vagrant and lawless a life."[2] Most significantly does he add that with the abolition of the laws vanished the crimes and the criminals they had created. But the despotism of democracy has yielded no better fruit. "The public have seen law defied," says President Charles W. Eliot, describing the attempts to control the American liquor traffic in the interest of virtue; "a whole generation of habitual lawbreakers, schooled in evasion and shamelessness; courts ineffective through
