than the chairman's verbal description was vouchsafed: no printed copies of it had been previously circulated, or were to be had at the meeting. And yet, astonishing to relate, this proprietary body had been already once betrayed by an agreement with this same leasing company!—had been led to undertake the making of the line on the strength of a seeming guarantee, which proved to be no guarantee! See, then, the lesson. The constitution of this company, like that of companies in general, was purely democratic. The proprietors elected their directors, the directors their chairman; and there were special provisions for restraining directors and replacing them when needful. Yet these forms of free government had fallen into disuse. And it is thus in all cases. Save on occasions when some scandalous mismanagement or corruption, bringing great loss, has caused a revolutionary excitement among them, railway-proprietors do not exercise their powers. Retiring directors beinsr reelected as a matter of form, the board becomes practically a close body; usually some one member, often the chairman, acquires supremacy; and so the government lapses into something between oligarchy and monarchy. All this, observe, happening not exceptionally but as a rule, happens among bodies of men mostly well educated, and many highly educated—people of means, merchants, lawyers, clergymen, etc. Ample disproof, if there needed any, of the notion that men are to be fitted for the right exercise of power by teaching.
And now to return: Any one, who looks through these facts and facts akin to them for the truth they imply, may see that forms of government are valuable only where they are products of national character. No cunningly-devised political arrangements will of themselves do any thing. No amount of knowledge respecting the uses of such arrangements will suffice. Nothing will suffice but the emotional nature to which such arrangements are adapted—a nature which, during social progress, has evolved the arrangements. And wherever there is want of congruity between the nature and the arrangements—wherever the arrangements, suddenly established by revolution, or pushed too far in advance by reforming change, are of a higher type than the national character demands, there is always a lapse proportionate to the incongruity. In proof I might enumerate the illustrations that lie scattered through the modern histories of Spain, of South America, of Mexico. Or I might dwell on the lesson (before briefly referred to) presented us in France; where the recurring political cycle always shows us that new Democracy is but old Despotism differently spelt—where now, as heretofore, we find Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, conspicuous on the public buildings, and now, as heretofore, have for interpretations of these words the extremest party-hatreds, vituperations and actual assaults in the Assembly, wholesale arrests of men unfriendly to those in power, forbiddings of public meetings, and suppressions of journals; and where now, as heretofore, writers, professing
