Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/86

 absolute tyranny of parliaments. The last now begin to delegate powers to local councils having administrative functions, and must presently delegate them to local parliaments having legislative functions on some "home-rule-all-round" principle, not because decentralisation is liked, but because the intolerable inconveniences of centralisation will make decentralisation inevitable. The more energetic propagandists of various systems of constitutional reform nearly all agree in one respect: they all desire to set up some new kind of tyranny. Few—except the philosophical anarchists, who suffer from the opprobrium brought upon the name of anarchists by quite a different set of thinkers—perceive that to endow with power any sort of machinery resting on the shifting will of a majority tends very little towards freedom and not at all towards stability—the latter even more important in some respects than the former. In proportion to the development of education (in nature even more than in extent), it is likely that the present blind faith of the public in the ability of the State to do almost anything, and the still blinder tendency of the public to require the State to do all sorts of things which could be better accomplished otherwise, will diminish, and we shall perceive the enormous educational disadvantage of allowing the citizen to lean too heavily on the