It is the banner of all the social hopes and ambitions of man,—pure or impure, noble or base, rational or irrational, possible or chimerical.
Now it is the glory of man to be ambitious. He alone, of all created beings, does not passively resign himself to evil; he alone incessantly aspires after good; not only for himself, but for his fellow-creatures. He respects and loves the race to which he belongs; he wishes to find a remedy for their miseries, and redress for their wrongs.
But man is no less imperfect than he is ambitious. Amidst his ardent and unceasing struggles to eradicate evil and to achieve good, every one of his virtuous inclinations is accompanied by an evil inclination which treads closely on its heels, or strives with it for precedence. The desire for justice and the desire for vengeance—the spirit of liberty and the spirit of tyranny—the wish to rise and the wish to abase what has risen—the ardent love of truth and the presumptuous temerity of fancied knowledge;—we may fathom all the depths of human nature; we shall find throughout, the same mingled yet conflicting qualities, the same danger from their close and easy approximation.
To all these instincts, at once contrary and parallel,—to all indiscriminately, the bad as well as the good,—the word Democracy holds out an interminable vista and infinite promises. It fosters every propensity, it speaks to every passion, of the heart of man; to the most generous and the most shameful, the most moral and the most immoral, the gentlest and the harshest, the most beneficent and the most destructive: to the former it loudly offers, to the latter it secretly and dimly promises, satisfaction.
Such is the secret of its power.
I am wrong in saying, the secret. The word Democracy is not new, and in all ages it has signified what it signifies now. But what is new and proper to our times is this: the word Democracy is now pronounced every day, every hour, and in every place; and at every time and place it is heard by all men. This formidable appeal to all that is most potent, for good and for evil, in man and in society, was formerly heard only transiently, locally, and among certain classes, which, though bound to other classes by the ties of a common country, were distinct and profoundly different from them. They lived at a distance from each other; each obscurely known to the other. Now there is but one society; and in this society there are no more lofty barriers, no more great distances, no more mutual obscurities. Whether it be false or true, noxious or salutary, when once a social idea arises, it penetrates everywhere, and its action is universal and constant. It is a torch that is never extinguished; a voice that is never wearied or hushed. Universality and publicity are from henceforth the conditions of all the great provocations addressed to men,—of all the great impulses given to society.
This is doubtless one of those absolute and sovereign facts which enter into the designs of God with regard to mankind.
Such being the fact, the empire of the word Democracy is not to be regarded as a transitory or local accident. It is the development—others would say the explosion—of all the elements of human nature throughout all the ranks and all the depths of society; and consequently the open, general, continuous, inevitable struggle of its good and evil instincts; of its virtues and its vices; of all its powers and faculties, whether to improve or to corrupt, to raise or to abase, to create or to destroy. Such is, from henceforth, the social state, the permanent condition of our nation.