Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/508

494 side of life—literature, art, science, philosophy, philanthropy. Shall any one say, then, with Renan, that "the origin of all civilization is aristocratic," that it is "the work of aristocrats"? On the contrary, its origin is democratic; it comes of freedom and self-control; it is the work of toil, so despised and oppressed in every feudal land.

Yet it is heard on every hand that, as civilization advances, political government—that is, the restraints of feudal despotism—must increase; otherwise the world will stop, and its lights go out. The cry is not from the throats of ignorant demagogues or rapacious politicians; it is raised by the most studious and thoughtful. "Law," said John Randolph Tucker, before the American Bar Association, "must grow with civilization, or," he added, showing that he had yet to learn what civilization means, "progress will cease, and the achievements of a people will be unworthy of their genius and, their character." Although Mr. Lecky has declared that the tendency "in the midst of the many and violent agitations of modern life to revert to archaic types of thought and custom will hereafter be considered one of the most remarkable characteristics of the nineteenth century," he, too, believes it to be "quite true that the functions of government must inevitably increase with a more complicated civilization." Even Mr. Godkin, who says most truly that "the best thing in the world is individual freedom" and that "a man who is compelled to work by law . . . is to all intents and purposes a slave," holds that "the world, through the increase of its offices and activity, needs far more regulation than it used to need." But the growth of law, the increase of functions and regulations, the creation of officials to correspond with both, is not progress—it is, as Mr. Lecky himself hints, retrogression; it does not point to the future—it points to the past; it is not the dawn of a better day—it is a return to the curse of the middle ages. No tribute to the purpose of official machinery can hide its kinship with feudalism. Nor can any sophistry blot out the fact that such machinery is only an attempt to fit the institutions of that hated and decadent form of social life, whose object was the prosecution of war, to modern social life, whose object is the cultivation of peace and industry, as well as self-control. The current belief that it will be more successful in the future than in the past is the most amazing delusion that ever lodged in the human mind. There is no magic in the diffusion of the irresponsible power of the one among the