Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/66

. “Universal suffrage,” he goes on, “would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine. It would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calender; it would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.” So much for England. What of the United States? I point briefly to the anti-evolution acts which now begin to adorn the statute-books of the Hookworm Belt, all of them supported vociferously by the lower orders. I point to the anti-vivisection and anti-contraception statutes, to the laws licensing osteopaths and other such frauds, and to the multitude of acts depriving relatively enlightened minorities of the common rights of free assemblage and free speech. They increase in proportion as vox populi is the actual voice of the state; they run with that “more democracy” which Liberals advocate. “Nothing in ancient alchemy,” says Lecky, “was more irrational than the notion that increased ignorance in the elective