Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/571

Rh true crux and crisis of modern republican institutions. Strictly speaking, the power that has been wrested from the monarch ought to be applied, as a good monarch would apply it, to the benefit of the state as a whole; but how is it really applied?

Here it is, as we conceive, that there is room for a teaching, to speak plainly, of far greater value and importance than that which the law prescribes in the interest of "temperance"; the teaching, to wit, that political power can be as much abused, and in multitudes of cases is as much abused, by the individual citizen as by any autocrat that ever lived. What can the autocrat do worse than use the power which he has grasped, or which has descended to him, for personal purposes instead of for public purposes? It is true he uses a great deal of power, and thus is in the way of doing a great deal of harm; but in essence he does no worse than the citizen who sells his vote or makes any use of it other than that which consideration of the public good would prescribe. The individual citizen wields but a fractional part of the power of the autocrat; but the part he wields does not belong to him as his personal property; and, if he uses it as such, he is simply a tyrant on a small scale, or, say, a fractional tyrant instead of an integral one. He is doing with his little bit of power just what the other man did with his vast and concentrated power. In fact, he is doing worse, because if he abuses his vote and influence he abuses all he possesses, whereas no autocrat was ever yet so bad that part of his power was not exercised for the public good. Tiberius and Nero were execrable men, but many of their public acts were directed to the good of the state. The idea, therefore, which it is important to get into the mind of the young is that the irresponsible voter is a tyrant: he is diverting to private purposes a measure of political power which only belongs to him for public purposes.

Then, just as in "temperance" education the evils of intemperance are vividly set forth—with many a lively excursus on the evils of even the most moderate use of stimulants—so it would be perfectly proper to exhibit in detail the baseness of a system of politics in which private interest takes the place of public duty. The case is more urgent by far, in our opinion, than the case for "temperance" instruction for this reason, that there is already a vast body of sentiment in the country favorable to temperance and even to total abstinence; whereas there can not be said to be any vast body of sentiment favorable to pure, honest, and disinterested politics. Every man occupying an important political position knows the kind of solicitations he receives for all sorts of things possible and impossible. He knows how often he is assured that unless certain offices, contracts, etc., are disposed of in a certain way there is no earthly chance of his party succeeding in the next contest in congressional district so-and-so. Every such man knows also that it is not only from the ignorant and socially inferior that such communications proceed—that, on the contrary, men of substance and reputation are their authors in perhaps the majority of cases. The assumption may be said to be almost universal that a man's vote is his own, and that in casting it he has nothing to consider but his own interest. That it is disgraceful to withdraw support from a party in which a man professes to have confidence and give it to one in which he professes to have no confidence, simply because some petty contract job or office is not disposed of to his