As a rule his wishes
prevail. His name becomes the symbol of party loyalty. Yet it is after all
a figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of duty
without necessarily engaging our affection.
Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic Democracy,
only in both cases the labels surviving.
IV
We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past
having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the
present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said of
peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped
from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacredness
to them also, and to their decrees.
That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plain
enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear.
With a kind of education--most men taught to read, very few to think--the
masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They will
continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts
of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and
political structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equality for all,
special privilege for none."
The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointed
of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the
man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the
ensuing "dark ages," like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and
Rome, emerge with a new civilization and religion.
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