at his conviction. His conviction makes him turn a deaf ear to
every objection, his sentiment inspires him with hatred for his
adversary. For him the man who is not a democrat is wrong, and further,
to him an object of hatred. In his eyes the distance between himself and
the aristocrat is as the distance between truth and error, nay between
good and evil, between honour and dishonour. The schoolmaster is the
fanatic vassal of democracy.

Then, as he is a man of one idea, he is single-minded, narrowly logical,
and logical to the utmost extreme. He goes straight forward where his
argument leads. An idea which admits neither qualification nor question
can go far in a very short space of time. And the schoolmaster drives
all his democratic principles to their natural and logical conclusion.

He develops these principles and all that they imply by the sheer force
of what he calls his "reasoning reason," and it appears to him to be not
only natural but salutary to seek their realisation. Everything of which
the principle is good is good itself, and no one but Montesquieu could
ever believe that an institution could be ruined by the excess of the
principle in which its merit consists.

The schoolmaster, therefore, deduces their logical consequences from the
two great democratic principles, the sovereignty of the nation, and
equality; he deduces them rigorously, and arrives at the following
conclusions.

The people alone is sovereign. Therefore, though there can be individual
liberty and liberty of association, there ought to be only such
individual liberty and liberty of association as the people permits.
Liberty cannot be and ought not to be anything more than a thing
tolerated by the sovereign people. The individual may think, speak,
write, and act as he pleases, but only so far as the people will allow
him; for if he can do these things with absolute freedom, or even with
limitations which are not imposed by the people, he becomes the
sovereign power, or the power which fixed the limits of his freedom
becomes the sovereign, and the sovereignty of the people disappears.

This brings us back to the simple definition that liberty is the right
to do what we please within the limits of the law. And who makes the
law? The people. Liberty is then the right to do everything which the
people permits us to do. Nothing more; if we attempt to go beyond this,
the sovereignty of the individual begins, and the sovereignty of the
peop