An amusing incident is related by Leroy Beaulieu of a Neapolitan who hired donkeys to tourists. He was an eager advocate of representative government in 1869. Questioned as to his reasons, he said that since twenty-one years he had been hiring donkeys to English, French, and American tourists, who enjoyed representative governments and were all rich. Some years later the eminent economist met him again, and congratulated him on Italy’s having acquired a representative constitution. The disabused peasant bitterly denounced the new regime in that the burden of taxation had trebled, and that the very donkey he hired out was taxed.
If the laws, or at least all important ones, were submitted to untrammelled public vote, then only might we say that the government was truly representative.
In many cases universal suffrage means the tyranny of ignorant, unprincipled majorities, while nowhere can it oppose an effective barrier against the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, and the creation of all-powerful oligarchies. When the majorities and the oligarchies come into collision, liberty will succumb. There will be more than one Bridge of Sighs.
It is in vain that false philosophers would persuade us that altruism, some vague “moral element of Christianism,” will combine with rationalism and perpetuate our Christian civilization in some transcendent form.
Christian civilization and morality are intimately and indissolubly connected with Christian dogma. The Fatherhood of God, Jupiter Optimus, was not unknown to the ancients, but the brotherhood of man, involving personal liberty and also civil liberty by extension, is essentially a Christian predicate, and is based on the dogma of the Incarnation.
The lofty contempt our modern rationalists express for the fierce controversy waged over two Greek vowels by the partisans of Homoousion and Homoiousion merely betrays their ignorance of its vital importance. On that dogma, so nobly maintained by the See of Peter and Athanasius, rests our whole fabric of Christian civilization, the brotherhood of man, and its logical sequence, freedom from slavery.
It is as absurd to suppose that the “moral element of Christianity” will continue to exist after the erosion of Christian dogma, as to expect that a tree we have hewn down will continue to bear fruit. It may indeed for a time remain verdant, and even put forth new shoots, just as we often see the loveliest flowers and fruits of Christianity in the lives and characters of individuals with whom the Christian faith has almost ceased to exist. But let us not be deceived. The lingering sap will cease to flow, and the last semblance of life will fade away. “The elements of dissolution have been multiplying all around us,” writes Lecky. And when rationalism or secularism, or neo-paganism in other words, which has already corroded Christendom to so great an extent, shall have accomplished its work of disintegration with the aid of godless schools and gross literature, society will, I repeat, be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery, or perish.
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION
“AT the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “the Church saved Christianity ... resisted the internal dissolution of the Empire and the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization.... Had the Church not existed the whole world must have been abandoned to purely material force” (History of Civilization, I, 38).... “When all was chaos, when every great social combination was vanishing, the Church proclaimed the unity of her doctrine and the universality of her right; this is a great and powerful fact which has rendered immense service to humanity” (ibid., II, 19).
This unity was indeed the great factor in European civilization. On it the new civil societies, like wild olive branches, were grafted, so to speak. It became the bond of political unity, a kind of centripetal force, we may say, and the redemption from that inordinate love of independence which characterized the barbarians.