Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/21

 or beneficent by comparison with an organised and militant anarchy like that of Russia. The worst accusation, indeed, which can be brought against such a despotism as the former, is that it naturally prepares a way for the coming of a more incurable and ineradicable evil in the impending advent of the latter. There can be no anarchy comparable for its power of maleficence to that of a nominally monarchical government in which the despot's hand, even while it grasps the helm, is fettered like any galley-slave's in a convict gang by the fitful good will and the perilous good pleasure of a multitude which having no liberty to do right, and no grace whereby to govern or to guide itself, must inevitably have in their stead a vague vast power to do evil, and a license of incalculable and lawless force wherewith to misguide and to misgovern the policy of a master who is the veriest bondman of them all.

Such axioms or reflections as these, we may be reminded, are stuff for a schoolboy's theme: but the stalest and most threadbare of all truths is surely more profitable for consideration than the brightest brandnew error or sophism in the world. And this is the one possibly not inadequate excuse for a too surely inadequate attempt to transcribe or to reassert what would seem to be the very rudiments of the instant question at issue. If our teachers of the moment invite us now to renounce or to reverse them, the humblest hearer on the lowest form of all has some right respectfully to ask and examine for himself what probable ground there may be to warrant