Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/504

490 benevolences and taxes, it is none the less despotism because the crime is done in the name of the people. Nor is it any the less a fit object of execration because it does not bear the title of Cæsar or the Council of Ten.

That democracy should be thought the protector of freedom and property is natural. Despite the dense clouds of cant and metaphysics that have enveloped it, the idea has a historic basis. The growth of civilization has been largely an abatement of the monopoly and amount of political control. Human society did not begin, to use the phrase of Hobbes, "with the desolate freedom of the wild ass." Morgan and Maine have made it a commonplace of science that there was never a time when the members of the primitive group had the rights and immunities conferred only upon those possessed of the power of moral control. "Mankind," says Prof. Burgess, confirming the truth of a social philosophy he rejects, "does not begin with liberty. Mankind acquires liberty through civilization," It is first subjected to a double dominion—that of custom and that of the leader become autocrat through the fortunes of war. To him belong the person and property of his subjects, to be used as whim or interest may direct. "Kings," said Louis XIV, expounding the doctrine of autocratic despotism, "are absolute lords, naturally possessing the entire and uncontrolled disposal of all property, whether belonging to the church or to the laity, to be exercised at all times with due regard to economy and to the general interests of the state." The political philosophy of English autocracy was the same. "As the father over one family," said Sir Robert Filmer, the apologist for the despotism of Charles I, "so the king, as the father over many families, extends his care to reserve, feed, clothe, instruct, and defend the whole commonwealth. His war, his peace, his courts of justice, and all his acts of sovereignty tend only to preserve and distribute to every subordinate and inferior father and to their children their rights and privileges, so that all the duties of a king are summed up in an universal fatherly care of his people."

Here is the point of departure in the long and desperate struggle against political control—a struggle that occupies the greater part of the history of civilization. If autocratic despotism has not, as in the East, deprived men of the desire to live their lives in their own way and to profit from their own skill and