d life; Great
Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising me to be
patient. Why should I continue loyal when my loyalty was so
contemptuously valued?

But I will not believe that it will come to this. An Englishman may be
heavily tempted, but in evil fortune as in good his heart is in the old
place. The administration of our affairs is taken for the present from
prudent statesmen, and is made over to those who know how best to
flatter the people with fine-sounding sentiments and idle adulation. All
sovereigns have been undone by flatterers. The people are sovereign now,
and, being new to power, listen to those who feed their vanity. The
popular orator has been the ruin of every country which has trusted to
him. He never speaks an unwelcome truth, for his existence depends on
pleasing, and he cares only to tickle the ears of his audience. His
element is anarchy; his function is to undo what better men have done.
In wind he lives and moves and has his being. When the gods are angry,
he can raise it to a hurricane and lay waste whole nations in ruin and
revolution. It was said long ago, a man full of words shall not prosper
upon the earth. Times have changed, for in these days no one prospers so
well. Can he make a speech? is the first question which the
constituencies ask when a candidate is offered to their suffrages. When
the Roman commonwealth developed from an aristocratic republic into a
democracy, and, as now with us, the sovereignty was in the mass of the
people, the oratorical faculty came to the front in the same way. The
finest speaker was esteemed the fittest man to be made a consul or a
praetor of, and there were schools of rhetoric where aspirants for office
had to go to learn gesture and intonation before they could present
themselves at the hustings. The sovereign people and their orators could
do much, but they could not alter facts, or make that which was not, to
be, or that which was, not to be. The orators could perorate and the
people could decree, but facts remained and facts proved the strongest,
and the end of that was that after a short supremacy the empire which
they had brought to the edge of ruin was saved at the last extremity;
the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the tongues of political
orators were silenced for centuries. Illusion at last takes the form of
broken heads, and the most obstinate credulity is not proof against that
form of argument.

CHAPTER XXI