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To have it a fair one, we should have been allowed to build and perfect the structure with our own material, not pile into it such ill-formed, incongruous stuff as the despotisms of Europe chose to send us.
It was highly important that with half the population foreign born, alien to our laws, unacquainted with our institutions and disposed to bring with them a sort of a hatred of authority born of experience under old-world despotisms, there should be present the educative and restraining influence of an adequate number of the riders in scarlet and gold.
It was at this period that the old despotisms founded by Imperial Vicars and Captains of the People came to be supplanted or crossed by those of military adventurers, just as at a somewhat later time the Condottiere and the Pope's nominee were blent in Cesare Borgia.
It is also a striking fact that the governments of all the great Asiatic empires have in all ages been absolute despotisms. And Heeren is right in connecting this with another great fact, which is important from its influence both on the political and the social life of Asiatics.
While in Asiatic despotisms the individual had no inner self and no self-justification, in the modern world man demands to be honored for the sake of his subjective individuality. The union of duty and right has the twofold aspect that what the State demands as duty should directly be the right of the individual, since the State is nothing but the organization of the concept of freedom.
To reign by flattery has been the common practice of the courtiers of all despotisms, the favorites of all tyrants; it is an old and trite method, but none the less odious for that. The honest politician should worship nothing but reason and justice, and it is his business to preach them to the masses, who represent, on an average, the age of childhood and not that of maturity.
It is not merely that he was a despot by birth and inclination, nor that he naturally substituted as far as was practicable, the despotic for the republican element, wherever his hand can be traced. There may be possible good in despotisms as there is often much tyranny in democracy.
And this change, whatever the outward shape in which it may incarnate itself, in the fulness of time, will come of changed ideas, opinions, and feelings in the general mind and heart. All institutions, even those of the oldest of despotisms, exist by the permission and consent of those who live under them.
The policy adopted was characteristic of these early despotisms, in its utter disregard of humanity and of everything but making the kingdom safe. It was not intentionally cruel, it was merely indifferent to the suffering it occasioned. 'Let us deal wisely with them' never mind about justice, not to say kindness.
Then will the people become great, after the conflicts of generations, and put under their feet the mockeries and lies and despotisms which grind them to despair."
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