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Updated: June 22, 2025
These examples bring me to the objection that will be raised to MINORITIES VERSUS MAJORITIES. No doubt, I shall be excommunicated as an enemy of the people, because I repudiate the mass as a creative factor. I shall prefer that rather than be guilty of the demagogic platitudes so commonly in vogue as a bait for the people.
In Persia, where a far larger community, already numerically superior to the Christian, the Jewish and the Zoroastrian minorities living in that country, had, notwithstanding the traditionally hostile attitude of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, succeeded in rearing the structure of its administrative institutions, the reaction to so momentous a declaration was such as to inspire its members and induce them to exploit, in the fullest measure possible, the enormous advantages which this wholly unexpected testimonial had conferred upon them.
But mainly we owe the large license of speech we enjoy to those influences and privileges common to us all as self-governing Americans. This Republic is the chosen home of minorities, of the less power in the presence of the greater. It is a common error to speak of our distinction as consisting in the rule of the majority. Majorities, the greater material powers, have always ruled before.
Other vested interests stand in a similar relation to the State. These minorities, which are important and lasting elements in society, receive consideration, and bounds are set to liberty of dealing adversely with them in practice, under that principle of fraternity which seeks the good of one in all and the good of all in one.
This, then, was the scene; on one side a great majority of Catholics and Protestants favorable for different practical reasons to Henry IV. turned Catholic king; on the other, two minorities, one of stubborn Catholics of the League, the other of Protestants anxious for their creed and their liberty; both discontented and distrustful.
At the level of a civilization, the government has been established almost universally as the outcome of armed struggle and military conquest, and has been exercised through the use of armed force in the hands of armed minorities.
He said that the Great Powers were now bestowing national existence or extensive territories upon the interested states, actually guaranteeing their frontiers, and therefore making themselves responsible for permanent tranquillity there. But the treatment of the minorities, he added, unless fair and considerate, might produce the gravest troubles and even precipitate wars.
And eighteen years later there was a whimsical pathos in the phrase in which he announced his fatal illness to a friend: "Yes, I am going to join the Majority and you know I have always preferred Minorities." It would be foreign to my purpose to criticize Lord Houghton as a poet.
To protest against tyranny, to protect minorities from oppression, to nullify an act committed in a spasm of popular fury, is to render a service to the Republic. But for the courts to arrogate to themselves functions which properly belong to the legislative bodies is all wrong, and in the end works mischief.
The Age naturally wishes to have the privilege of electing six senators as it did ten delegates to the Federal Convention, and contends that the majority should elect all the senators; the Argus rushes to the other extreme in declaring that six separate minorities ought to be represented, and ignores the risk that these minorities would be formed on a class or religious basis.
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