ontroversy has made everybody familiar with
Burke's saying, that men learn the price of freedom by being masters of
slaves.

From the best days of Athens, the days of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and
Socrates, a strange affinity has subsisted between democracy and
religious persecution. The bloodiest deed committed between the wars of
religion and the revolution was due to the fanaticism of men living
under the primitive republic in the Rhaetian Alps; and of six democratic
cantons only one tolerated Protestants, and that after a struggle which
lasted the better part of two centuries. In 1578 the fifteen Catholic
provinces would have joined the revolted Netherlands but for the furious
bigotry of Ghent; and the democracy of Friesland was the most intolerant
of the States. The aristocratic colonies in America defended toleration
against their democratic neighbours, and its triumph in Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania was the work not of policy but of religion. The French
Republic came to ruin because it found the lesson of religious liberty
too hard to learn. Down to the eighteenth century, indeed, it was
understood in monarchies more often than in free commonwealths.
Richelieu acknowledged the principle whilst he was constructing the
despotism of the Bourbons; so did the electors of Brandenburg, at the
time when they made themselves absolute; and after the fall of
Clarendon, the notion of Indulgence was inseparable from the design of
Charles II. to subvert the constitution.

A government strong enough to act in defiance of public feeling may
disregard the plausible heresy that prevention is better than
punishment, for it is able to punish. But a government entirely
dependent on opinion looks for some security what that opinion shall be,
strives for the control of the forces that shape it, and is fearful of
suffering the people to be educated in sentiments hostile to its
institutions. When General Grant attempted to grapple with polygamy in
Utah, it was found necessary to pack the juries with Gentiles; and the
Supreme Court decided that the proceedings were illegal, and that the
prisoners must be set free. Even the murderer Lee was absolved, in 1875,
by a jury of Mormons.

Modern democracy presents many problems too various and obscure to be
solved without a larger range of materials than Tocqueville obtained
from his American authorities or his own observation. To understand why
the hopes and the fears that it excites have been