And whereas one man is wise and another foolish, and one is upright and another crooked, yet in this suffrage none is greater or less than another. The vote is equal, the dignity co-eternal.
Truth is one and right is one; yet right is right because the majority so declare it, and justice is justice because the majority so declare it.
And if the majority affirm one thing to-day, that is right; and if the majority affirm the opposite to-morrow, that is right.
Because the will of the majority is the ground of right and there is no other, &c. &c. &c.
This is the Radical faith, which, except every man do keep whole and undefiled, he is a Tory and an enemy of the State, and without doubt shall perish everlastingly.
Once the Radical was a Liberal and went for toleration and freedom of opinion. He has become a believer now. He is right and you are wrong, and if you do not agree with him you are a fool, and you are wicked besides. Voltaire says that atheism and superstition are the two poles of intellectual disease. Superstition he thinks the worse of the two. The atheist is merely mistaken, and can be cured if you show him that he is wrong. The fanatic can never be cured. Yet each alike, if he prevails, will destroy human society. What would Voltaire have expected for poor mankind had he seen both the precious qualities combined in this new Symbolum Fidei?
A creed is not a reasoned judgment based upon experience and insight. It is a child of imagination and passion. Like an organised thing, it has its appointed period and then dies. You cannot argue it out of existence. It works for good; it works for evil; but work it will while the life is in it. Faith, we are told, is not contradictory to reason, but is above reason. Whether reason or faith sees truer, events will prove.
One more observation this American gentleman made to me. He was speaking of the want of spirit and of the despondency of the West Indian whites. 'I never knew, sir,' he said, 'any good come of desponding men. If you intend to strike a mark, you had better believe that you can strike it. No one ever hit anything if he thought that he was most likely to miss it. You must take a cheerful view of things, or you will have no success in this world.'
'Tyne heart tyne a',' the Scotch proverb says. The Anglo-West Indians are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature about them. They can get no help except in themselves, and they can help themselves after all if we allow them fair play. The Americans will not touch them politically, but they will trade with them; they will bring their capital and their skill and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and more prosperous than ever they were—on one condition: they will risk nothing in such enterprises as long as the shadow hangs over them of a possible government by a black majority. Let it suffice to have created one Ireland without deliberately manufacturing a second.