Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/515

Rh fluctuations of policy, delays, perjuries, negligencies, and other miscarriages of justice; officers of the law double-faced and mercenary, legislators timid and insincere, candidates for office hypocritical and truckling, and officeholders unfaithful to pledges and to reasonable public expectation."

"But," urges some philanthropic statesman, enamored of quackery for social and political ills, "is it not possible to frame laws with sufficient skill and to get them enforced with sufficient vigor to hasten human progress? Too intolerable altogether is it to await the slow pace of evolution." Intolerable though it be, it is far less so than the remedy urged, which was foredoomed from the first to inevitable disaster. It is a flagrant violation of the law of social and physical growth. The union of merit with benefit is as vital as the union of breath with life. The severance of the one is punished with the same certainty and severity as the severance of the other. Men must not be deprived of the fruits of their talents and toil; they must not be allowed to escape the penalties attached to ignorance and indolence. Protection against this law was. the inherent and destructive vice of the rule of the one and of the few; it is the vice also of the rule of the many. "When despotism," says Boudrillart, catching a glimpse of this truth, "becomes the régime of a nation, is it not its fatal law to revive favors and privileges, and to destroy equality for the benefit of the low and unworthy?" As if fresh from the study of the national, State, and municipal governments of the United States, Maine replies in the affirmative. "When the ingenious legislator," he says, "had counted on producing a nation of self-denying and somewhat sentimental patriots, he finds that he has created a people of Jacobins or a people of slaves." Necessarily is it so. Self-interest, enlisted in behalf of the prostitution of public affairs, as must be the case under every form of despotism, can produce nothing but inefficiency and corruption. A powerful bureaucracy can only destroy the independence of a people and render them unfit to care for themselves. If they have not wholly lost spirit, any failure to give them relief from the woes they have been taught to charge to the government is certain to turn them into rioters and revolutionists. It did so in Greece and Rome; it did so in the Italian republics; it will do so in their modern successors.

Of the many "problems of democracy" that now vex the victims of social and political speculation, there is one at least that admits of solution. It is the utter unfitness of any class of people to exercise special dominion, even though they be "leading