one who, by means of an hypnotic loquaciousness, is constantly persuading the people that they have only to follow their first impulsive emotions to be right and safe, and that as a consequence every institution should be swept away which in their wiser, calmer moments they have created as a bulwark against their own more variable nature. To complete the picture we need to contrast with it Burke's portrait of the men of light and leading, with his sober statement of the law of liberty: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Or we may go further back and look upon Plato's portrait of the guides who have earned the right to persuade others to temperance by the diligent exercise of that virtue in their own lives.
But the most notable example of demagoguery to-day is not a man, though he be clothed with thunder, but an institution. There are newspapers and magazines, reaching millions of readers, which have reduced the art to a perfect system. Their method is as simple as it is effective: always appeal to the emotion of the hour, and present it in terms which will justify its excess. Thus, in times when there is no wave of international envy disturbing the popular mind, our journal will print edifying editorials on brotherly love, and laud the people as the great source of peace among nations. But let some racial dispute arise, as in the months preceding our Spanish war or the Italian raid on Africa, and this same journal will day after day use its editorial columns to inflame national hatred—and increase its circulation. On days when no sensational event has occurred, it will indulge in the prettiest sentimental sermons on the home and on family felicities. Nothing so moral; it will even plead in lacrimose type against the evil of allowing babies to lie in perambulators with their eyes exposed to the sun. But let the popular mind be excited by some crime of lust, and the same journal will forget the sweet obligations of home and wife—
That silly old morality,
That, as these links were knit, our love should be—
and will deck out the loathsome debauchery of a murderer and his trull as the spiritual history of two young souls finding themselves in the pure air of passion; or some sordid liaison will be virtually lifted above marriage by the terms "affinity" or "heart-wife." And always, meanwhile, the people are to be soothed out of a sense of responsibility for errors and corruption by the skilfully maintained suggestion of a little group of men entirely removed from the feelings and motives of ordinary humanity, sitting somewhere in secret conclave, plotting, plotting, to pervert the government. Our public crimes are never our own, but are the result of conspiracy.
These are the agencies that, in varying forms, have been at work in many ages. Only now we have formulated them into a noble maxim, which you will hear daily resounding in the pulpit and the press and in the street: "The cure of democracy is more democracy." It is a lie, and we know it is a lie. We know that this cry of the demagogue has invariably in the past led to anarchy and to despotism; and we know that to-day, were these forces unopposed, as happily they are not unopposed, the same result would occur—
Our liberty reversed and charters gone,
And we made servants to Opinion.
The remedy for the evils of license is not in the elimination of popular restraint, but precisely in bringing the people to respect and follow their right leaders. The cure of democracy is not more democracy, but better democracy.
Nor is such a cure dependent primarily on the appearance, in a community, of men capable of the light: for these the world always has, and these we too have in abundance; it depends rather on so relating these select natures to the community that they shall be also men of leading. The danger is lest, in a State which bestows influence and honors on its demagogues, the citizens of more refined intelligence, those true philosophers who have discourse of reason, and have won the difficult citadel of their own souls, should withdraw from public affairs and retire into that citadel, as it were into an ivory tower. The harm wrought by such a condition is twofold: it deprives the better minds of the larger sustenance of popular sympathy, producing among them a kind of intellectual préciosité and a languid interest in art as a refuge from life instead of an integral part of life; and, on the other hand, it tends to leave the mass of society a prey to the brutalized emotions of indiscriminate pleasure-seeking. In such a State distinction becomes the sorry badge of isolation. The need is to provide for a natural aristocracy.
Now it must be clearly understood that in advocating such a measure, at least under the conditions that actually prevail to-day, there is involved no futile intention of abrogating democracy, in so far as democracy means government by and of the people. A natural aristocracy does not demand the restoration of inherited privilege or a relapse into the crude dominion of money; it is not synonymous with oligarchy or plutocracy. It calls rather for some machinery or some social consciousness which shall ensure the selection from among the community at large of the truly "best," and the bestowal on them of "power"; it is the true consummation of democracy. And, again, it must be said emphatically that this is not an academic question, dealing with unreal distinctions. No one supposes that the "best" are a sharply defined class, moving about among their fellows with a visible halo above them, and a smile of beatific superiority on their faces. Society is not made of such classifications, and governments have always been of a more or less mixed character. A natural aristocracy signifies rather a tendency than a conclusion; and in such a sense it was taken, no doubt, by my sociological friend of radical ideas who pronounced it the great practical problem of the day.