"If you enthrone it (liberty) alone as means and end, it will lead society first to anarchy, afterward to the despotism which you fear," says Mazzini, one of the shining liberators of the last century.
"If every man has all the liberty he wants, no man has any liberty," says Goethe.
In other words, the rights of man must be articulated with the duties of man. Freedom cannot exist without order. They are concentric. Without the recognition of the sanctity of obligation to others, the age-long aspiration of the race for liberty is an impotent endeavor. It would have plunged eyeless through the cycles in which it has worked its way into civilization, had it not been that reciprocity, mutual help, is a basis of its being. Mankind can never be absolved from this eternal law.
We are now told that a reaction has set in against democracy; that the results of the democratic ideal, so far as attained, are a failure; that the tyranny of the mob has succeeded to that of the single despot; that in the most liberal governments of the world, even in the United States and England, where the problem of self-government has been most thoroughly worked out, the people are forgetting their high ideals and are using their collective power for base and ignoble purposes; that the moral tone of the government is lowered; that an insane greed for wealth has infected the nations: that there is a blunting of moral responsibility and a cheapening of national aims.
This great indictment comes from intense lovers of liberty and the truest friends of democracy.
Herbert Spencer put himself on record, in his last years, as fearing that the insolent imperialism of the times and the power of reactionary forces would lead to the re-barbarization of society.
John Stuart Mill said, "The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilization generally, is towards collective mediocrity."
John Morley tells us that "outside natural science and the material arts, the lamp burns low;" he complains that nations are listening to "the siren song of ambition;" that while there is an immense increase in material prosperity, there is an immense decline of sincerity of spiritual interest. He also speaks of "the high and dry optimism which presents the existing order of things as the noblest possible, and the undisturbed sway of the majority as the way of salvation."
If you care to read the summing up of the tremendous indictment against modern democracy, you will find it in Hobhouse's striking work, "Democracy and Reaction." This thoughtful author claims that the new imperialism, which has become an obsession among the great powers of the world within a few years, "stands not for widened and ennobled sense of national responsibility, but for a hard assertion of racial supremacy and national force;" and pleads for "the unfolding of an order of ideas by which life is stimulated and guided," and for "a reasoned conception of social justice."
Unfortunately there is too much truth in all these utterances. These are not "wild and whirling words." We need not to be told of the evils of our times. We hardly dare turn the searchlight upon our own civilization, for we know how much of shame it reveals. We need no candid, sympathetic, and enlightened critic like James Bryce, to tell us where our republic is weak, in spite of our Titanic power, immense prosperity, roaring trade, restless energy, chartered freedom. We know that, in many respects, "the times are out of joint." The sordid and incapable governments of many of our large cities; the venality among those to whom great public trusts have been committed; the recrudescence of race prejudice; the colossal fortunes heaped up by shrewd manipulations of laws, which have been twisted from their original intent, and by un-ethical methods; mob-violence, lynch law, the ever-widening hostility between the employers of labor and the wage-earner; so much of what Jeremy Taylor called "prosperous iniquity;" the blare of jingoism, the coarser and grosser forms which athletics have assumed, even among young men who are students at our universities—in the sublime words of Milton, "beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies;" the hatred felt by the poor towards the rich, and the disdain felt by the rich for the poor; all these and many other evils, indeed, exist. Yes, the times are out of joint. But they have always been out of joint.