energy, they find it intolerable. They lapse into doubt as to the divinity, benevolence, and wisdom of the master that holds them in bondage. Like the English barons, they unite to wrest from him some right or privilege, some bar to the arbitrary seizure of their person and property. With the triumph of their courage and efforts passes the power of the one to the hands of the few. As a landed aristocracy, like that of feudalism, or as a commercial oligarchy, like that of Florence and Venice, they become the new despots. They, in turn, rule by divine right; their voice is the voice of God; and disobedience to their commands becomes impiety and treason. While they have introduced, in a measure, the reign of liberty in the ordering of their own lives, the many are still the victims of unmitigated despotism. Whether it be in Greece or Italy, in Spain or England, in France or Germany, their lives and property are not their own. Describing the government of lower Austria at the close of the middle ages, Navagero tells us that there were "five sorts of persons—clergy, barons, nobles, burghers, and peasants." Of the peasants, however, "no account" was made, because they had "no voice in the Diet." But there was still a sixth sort—the servile laborers—of even less account. Yet the peasants were hardly better off than slaves. They were not merely obliged to bear much heavier taxation than the barons, nobles, and burghers, but they had no part in tempering its weight. That, as in other aristocratic countries, was the arbitrary work of the upper classes. As in other countries also, the upper classes determined their own burdens.[1] There was still to be won for the lower classes the same right. Not only must they be permitted to fix the amount of their taxes, but they must have exemption from arbitrary seizure; they must have impartial justice; they must have deliverance from the countless restraints upon their freedom. When these conquests of the masses over the classes have been made, there is then the advent of democracy, the power that so many fear and hate, that so many hail as the beginning of a better day. Misrepresented as it has been by friend and foe, it signifies nothing more dreadful or more wonderful than the possession of the right of every man to direct his own life as seems to him best. It is the application to politics of the fundamental principle of Protestantism—the concession of the same freedom in individual conduct as is granted in individual belief.[2]
- ↑ James Russell Lowell. Collected Works, vol. vi, p. 14.
- ↑ "As it is useful," says Mill (On Liberty, Ticknor & Fields edition, p. 109), "that while mankind are imperfect, that there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that full scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others, and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practicable when any one thinks fit to try them."
