Statesman and Demagogue.
On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on the other is a demagogue, ranting about the tyranny of the capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folk are in want of necessaries.
Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman who hears his children cry for bread?
I seriously apprehend you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things that will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should, in a season of scarcity, devour all the seed-corn, and thus make the next year not one of scarcity, but of absolute famine.
There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on its downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Cæsar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth.
Curious that Macaulay's fears for America should not have been felt by Americans themselves until now. Even to-day, when in some degree the symptoms he described a half century ago are making their appearance, the American people is more interested in the situation than alarmed by it; for the Americans, like the English, rely with confidence upon the Anglo-Saxon genius for working things out.