of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy,
public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on
arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to
frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but
Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life
is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept
under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in
aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of
opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if
ill-defined limits. The patriots of Virginia proclaimed in 1775 that any
who dared 'by speech or writing to maintain' Royalist or Constitutional
views should be treated as an enemy of his country. A similar ban was
put some fifty years ago upon the Abolitionists of Illinois and
Connecticut. A time came when it was almost equally dangerous to
maintain the constitutional doctrines which the Abolitionists had
assailed. Nowadays, of actual persecution there is little, because there
is little need; because the repression acts, save with the most
independent, original and contradictious tempers, upon thought rather
than expression. No human intellect or character can resist the
universal, insensible, unconscious, pressure of the atmosphere which
surrounds it from the cradle. Upon certain political, social, and
ethical dogmas, wherever national pride and democratic prejudice are
touched, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the 'unanimous
opinion' of the North and West has demoralized or extinguished thought
itself.

Demos is not only tyrant but Pope. He feels, and his courtiers venture
openly to claim for him, not only the royalty which can do no wrong, but
the infallibility which can define right and wrong themselves. He
resents, we are told upon democratic authority, all pretension to
special knowledge.

'No observer of American polities' (Mr. Godkin admits in his
reply to Sir Henry Maine) 'can deny that, with regard to
matters which can become the subject of legislation, the
American voter listens with extreme impatience to anything
which has the air of instruction; but the reason is to be
found not in his dislike of instruction so much as his
dislike in the political field of anything which savours of
superiority. The passion for equality is one of the very
strongest influences in