He is a convinced democrat and a sentimental democrat. His conviction forms a solid basis for his sentiment, and his sentiment kindles to a white heat his conviction. His conviction makes him turn a deaf ear to every objection, his sentiment inspires him with hatred for his adversary. For him the man who is not a democrat is wrong, and further, to him an object of hatred. In his eyes the distance between himself and the aristocrat is as the distance between truth and error, nay between good and evil, between honour and dishonour. The schoolmaster is the fanatic vassal of democracy.
Then, as he is a man of one idea, he is single-minded, narrowly logical, and logical to the utmost extreme. He goes straight forward where his argument leads. An idea which admits neither qualification nor question can go far in a very short space of time. And the schoolmaster drives all his democratic principles to their natural and logical conclusion.
He develops these principles and all that they imply by the sheer force of what he calls his "reasoning reason," and it appears to him to be not only natural but salutary to seek their realisation. Everything of which the principle is good is good itself, and no one but Montesquieu could ever believe that an institution could be ruined by the excess of the principle in which its merit consists.
The schoolmaster, therefore, deduces their logical consequences from the two great democratic principles, the sovereignty of the nation, and equality; he deduces them rigorously, and arrives at the following conclusions.
The people alone is sovereign. Therefore, though there can be individual liberty and liberty of association, there ought to be only such individual liberty and liberty of association as the people permits. Liberty cannot be and ought not to be anything more than a thing tolerated by the sovereign people. The individual may think, speak, write, and act as he pleases, but only so far as the people will allow him; for if he can do these things with absolute freedom, or even with limitations which are not imposed by the people, he becomes the sovereign power, or the power which fixed the limits of his freedom becomes the sovereign, and the sovereignty of the people disappears.
This brings us back to the simple definition that liberty is the right to do what we please within the limits of the law. And who makes the law? The people. Liberty is then the right to do everything which the people permits us to do. Nothing more; if we attempt to go beyond this, the sovereignty of the individual begins, and the sovereignty of the people disappears.
—But to have liberty to do only what the people permits, this is to be free as we were under Louis XIV.—and that is not to be free at all!
So be it. There will indeed be no liberty unless the law permit it. Surely you do not wish to be free in opposition to the law?
—The law may be tyrannical. It is tyrannical if it is unjust.—
The law has the right to be unjust. Otherwise the sovereignty of the people would be limited and this must not be.