writers. In political philosophy, it should be used as a salutary cold douche. For example, Sybel says that universal suffrage has always heralded the downfall of parliamentary government. Tocqueville caps this by reminding us that the more successful Democracy is in leveling a population, the less will be the resistance which the next despotism will have to encounter.
No doubt, in this region there are transformations which can hardly occur without an intermediary phase. It does not seem possible for Democracy, which disintegrates society into individuals and only collects them again into mobs, to pass directly into its opposite state, Socialism. Russian autocracy, now standing on its head, is more of an autocracy than ever; the little finger of Lenin is thicker than the loins of Nicholas the First. But other transformations are quite possible. We may trace the progress of unlimited competition toward a point where it destroys itself. The competing units, which began as individuals acting in isolation, become larger and larger aggregates, until they succeed in establishing monopolies, which bring competition to an end.
Or, if competition is not terminated in this way, it may end by exhausting the competitors. The conditions of success may become so severe that the ruling caste rules itself out, and is displaced by non-competitive strata of the population. This fate often befalls warlike and predatory races: they who take the sword perish by the sword. The wolves disappear; the sheep survive. Some movements disintegrate so rapidly that they live only in the reactions which they produce. This is true of all violent revolutions, especially when they include communistic experiments. Thus the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, which looked like mere anarchism and bloodthirstiness, inaugurated the bourgeois régime of the nineteenth century. Our present social unrest may issue in the emergence of a privileged section of wage-earners, and so broaden the basis of conservatism.
Sometimes the transformation is of a more subtle kind. Roman imperialism broke up the old city patriotism in the civilized Eastern provinces, and destroyed the tribal patriotism of the barbarians by substituting for it a feeling of reverence for the Empire. The ruling race itself was partly absorbed, but very largely extinguished. Yet the Empire, though it decayed as a fact, survived as an idea. It had a new and very remarkable lease of life, in an idealized form, as the Roman Church.
So, on a still larger scale, Jewish nationalism, by its uncompromising fanaticism, caused the destruction of the Holy City and the annihilation of the Jewish State; but in Christianity it had a new and boundless extension. The civilized world has adopted Zion as its spiritual capital, and David and the prophets as its spiritual heroes. In both cases the idea triumphed in the form most repugnant to its first custodians. The patriotic Jew would have regarded with horror the prospect of his sacred books being annexed by the Gentiles of the West; and we can imagine the feelings of Trajan, or Tacitus, on being told that a Christian priest would rule a world-wide theocracy from the Vatican. The ironies of history are on a colossal scale, and must, one is tempted to think, cause great amusement to a superhuman spectator.
This chameleon-like character of human institutions, these Protean changes, are, when they are once realized, a considerable obstacle to the extreme form of state-loyalty. They do not affect the love of country, for we may imagine that the innermost life of a nation persists through all changes;
