by his soldiers for an increase of pay. But where popular
authority is absolute and unrestrained, the people have an infinitely
greater, because a far better founded, confidence in their own power.
They are themselves in a great measure their own instruments. They are
nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less under responsibility to
one of the greatest controlling powers on earth, the sense of fame and
estimation. The share of infamy that is likely to fall to the lot of
each individual in public acts is small indeed: the operation of opinion
being in the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power. Their
own approbation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a public
judgment in their favor. A perfect democracy is therefore the most
shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also
the most fearless. No man apprehends in his person that he can be made
subject to punishment. Certainly the people at large never ought: for,
as all punishments are for example towards the conservation of the
people at large, the people at large can never become the subject of
punishment by any human hand.[96] It is therefore of infinite importance
that they should not be suffered to imagine that their will, any more
than that of kings, is the standard of right and wrong. They ought to be
persuaded that they are full as little entitled, and far less qualified,
with safety to themselves, to use any arbitrary power whatsoever; that
therefore they are not, under a false show of liberty, but in truth to
exercise an unnatural, inverted domination, tyrannically to exact from
those who officiate in the state, not an entire devotion to their
interest, which is their right, but an abject submission to their
occasional will: extinguishing thereby, in all those who serve them, all
moral principle, all sense of dignity, all use of judgment, and all
consistency of character; whilst by the very same process they give
themselves up a proper, a suitable, but a most contemptible prey to the
servile ambition of popular sycophants or courtly flatterers.

When the people have emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish will,
which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever should,--when
they are conscious that they exercise, and exercise perhaps in a higher
link of the order of delegation, the power which to be legitimate must
be according to that eternal, immutable law in which will and reason are
the same,