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It is out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that there is something in the other person's position. And those drilled in party discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is nothing there is Satan.
"Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy." France was likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have liked to recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an empire in Mexico, behind which lay hostility to our Democracy.
It had long been clear to discerning men of all shades that the strife of parties could not be settled by civil conflict, but only by military power; but the course of the coalition between the democracy and the powerful military chiefs, through which the rule of the senate had been terminated, showed with inexorable clearness that every such alliance ultimately issued in a subordination of the civil under the military elements, and that the popular party, if it would really rule, must not ally itself with generals properly foreign and even hostile to it, but must make generals of its own leaders themselves.
"They're not going to leave him alone," I said. "I'm sure of that now. Whether he grafts or whether he's honest won't make any difference. The crowd is going to pull him down. Because it's not democracy. The trouble with all your big men at the top is that they're trying to do for the crowd what the crowd wants to do for itself.
In a word, do the men who build up free institutions need any thing more from the Federal government than that it should place in their hands the ax and the sword of democracy, and let them alone?
"Are we not told that this catechism was freely agreed to by the sovereign people? A fine sovereignty, truly! Idiots, who puff out your cheeks over the word Democracy! Democracy is the art of usurping the people's place, of shearing their wool off closely, in this holy name, for the benefit of some of Democracy's good apostles.
The essential theory of democracy is the diffusion of power among the whole people, so that the evils produced by one man's possession of great power shall be obviated. But the diffusion of power through democracy is only effective when the voters take an interest in the question involved.
The ideas of the French democracy were in the beginning revolutionary, disorderly, and subversive of national consistency and good faith. No doubt the French democracy had a much better excuse for identifying democracy with a system of abstract rights and an indiscriminate individualism than had the American democracy.
On seeing the Queen and the Prince of Wales driving through the gardens at Windsor, his comment was "Fat, useless royalty;" and in 1897 he wrote from England to Arthur Sedgwick, "There are many things here which reconcile me to America." In truth, much of his criticism of America is only an elaboration of his criticism of democracy.
An Arab town or village is a democracy in which each free man has his say; not even a sheik can overrule the vote of a majority, and this man was no sheik. But rage and self-assertion will generally exercise a certain weight in tribal councils, and the crowd in this case was too doubtful of the facts to have any settled notions of its own.
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