Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/509

 Rh irresponsible many. Wisdom and virtue do not increase with the multiplication of the greed and ignorance intrusted with the management of an important and difficult enterprise. Forty millions of despots under the hierarchy of other despots trying to force thirty millions of subjects under the same debasing rule, to live a life not their own and to contribute money to a use they have no interest in, is just as much a form of feudalism as the government of a Bourbon prince or of a council of Spartan ephors. It is just as certain to evoke the same evils and stir up the same revolt that have overthrown every other despotism.

Ignored as this truth has been and still is in speculation and practice, it has been tacitly recognized and acted upon. That is why the tyranny of the majority has been branded as no better than the tyranny of the minority; why publicists from Aristotle to Mill and Spencer have declaimed against its perils; why so much has been done in contravention of the belief that progress is to be sought through an increase of these perils; why scheme after scheme for the selection of representatives, for the restriction of legislatures, for the appointment of officials, and for the prevention of extravagance and fraud, have been invented; why every one of them has failed, and must inevitably fail. The virtue of human wit is not greater than the virtue of human character. A system of regulation can not be devised that will not yield to some plan to subvert it. "If, in Greece," says Polybius, describing an experience constantly duplicated in modern democracies, "the state intrusts to any one only a talent, and if it has ten checking clerks, and as many seals, and twice as many witnesses, it can not insure his honesty." But with character any political system