Part 42 (2/2)
This is merely to note the roups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to do when left to himself and his individual accountability
Under a wise dispensation of power, despotisovernment The trouble is that despotism is seldo essentially selfish, grasping and tyrannous As a rule therefore revolution--usually of force--has been required to change or reforned for ument in favor of the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the ante-chamber of eternal life It would be a cruel Deity that condemned man to the brief and vexed span of hurave
We know not whence we cauess that we shall in the end get better than we have known
III
Historic democracy is dead
This is not to say that a Deanization has ceased to exist Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that the Democratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is dead or the Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the Populist party is dead That which has died is the Democratic party of Jefferson and Jackson and Tilden The principles of government which they laid down and advocated have been for the most part obliterated
What slavery and secession were unable to acco sue
The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the Democratic Senators and Representatives froh the prohibition arace_ was administered by a President of the United States elected as a Dee aovernment for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfully battled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization was invited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of State rights The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper, the way is open for the obliteration of the States in all their essential functions and the erection of a Federal Govern of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream
When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said of Woodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than by character He was favored of the Gods He possessed a bright, forceful h it sometimes ran aith him, his pen possessed extraordinary facility
Thus he was ever able to put his best foot foreer sense a leader of ton, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent to consistency
The pen is htier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart as well as a brain He ields itour Chief Executive enormous powers As a rule his wishes prevail His name becoure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of duty without necessarily engaging our affection
Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic De
IV
We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the present is the divine right of parlia seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped froiven sacredness to them also, and to their decrees
That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seeo, and where they will end, is not so clear With a kind of education--ht to read, very few to think--the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves
They will continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and political structure clai to rest upon the fore for none”
The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world es,” like those that sed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and Roion
”Man never is, but always to be blessed” We know not whence we cas eternal in the hu History seereed upon, yet not without dispute
V