Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/466

450 into foolish actions have been frightened entirely by their own shadows; or that, if by communism is meant a blind bitter irritation with things as they exist, there has not been communism in it. On the contrary, at the bottom of all this is deep social and political discontent. It is not radical, because it is not intelligent. It has been willing to follow those who promised really nothing; it has demanded only quack remedies because it is ignorant. But it is this that makes it dangerous. Ignorance, inflamed by passion, is the most terrible and destructive of monsters. The Jacqueries, the massacres, the reigns of terror, the revolutions which have overthrown one tyrant only to put a worse one in his place, have not been the work of those intelligent enough to see that social and political evils arise from wrong systems, but of those who, not quarreling with systems, charge the evils from which they suffer upon the wickedness of individuals or classes.

Had this movement involved anything which could properly be styled socialistic or communistic, it would have seemed to me hopeful, for socialism and communism involve some sort of theories which show at least a groping for real remedies. But what seems to me ominous in all these events is, that they show how easily our political struggles may pass into all the bitterness and dangers of excited class-feeling without calling forth any principle of improvement or reform. There is a comfortable belief widespread among us that, under a popular government, social and political evils tend to cure themselves by arousing the attention of the people. This would be true if, when the people became conscious of an evil, they stopped to think about its cause and its cure instead of following the first demagogue who, flattering their prejudices and appealing to their passions, promised them a cure. But this is not the lesson of history, nor yet does it seem to me the lesson of observation. What has been passing under my eyes has, with much greater vividness and force than I can convey in such a brief sketch, appeared to me to show the play of the same forces that have over and over again brought despotism out of freedom, anarchy out of order, and turned progress into retrogression. Popular government is not a new thing. All government in its beginning must have been popular government. And under all forms of government the people are the source of power. The force with which despots and tyrants, enslavers and destroyers, have worked has always been the force of the people themselves. Vox populi vox Dei! If that means anything more than that majorities are the source of power, it is as absurd a superstition as the faith in Mumbo Jumbo.

The danger to social order is not a direct one. The forces that would rally at any open assault upon it have with us overwhelming strength. The real danger comes through forms of legality and methods of government. Tweed and his little band would have been lodged in jail in a trice had they directly attempted their robberies; yet Tweed and his handful for years levied at their will upon the wealth of New