rnment. The trouble is that despotism is seldom,
if ever, wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being essentially
selfish, grasping and tyrannous. As a rule therefore revolution--usually
of force--has been required to change or reform it. Perfectibility
was not designed for mortal man. That indeed furnishes the strongest
argument in favor of the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the
ante-chamber of eternal life. It would be a cruel Deity that condemned
man to the brief and vexed span of human existence with nothing beyond
the grave.

We know not whence we came, or whither we go; but it is a fair guess
that we shall in the end get better than we have known.

III

Historic democracy is dead.

This is not to say that a Democratic party organization has ceased to
exist. Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that the
Democratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is
dead or the Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the
Populist party is dead. That which has died is the Democratic party of
Jefferson and Jackson and Tilden. The principles of government which
they laid down and advocated have been for the most part obliterated.
What slavery and secession were unable to accomplish has been brought
about by nationalizing sumptuary laws and suffrage.

The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the Democratic
Senators and Representatives from the South and West who carried through
the prohibition amendment. The _coup de grace_ was administered by a
President of the United States elected as a Democrat when he approved
the Federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution.

The kind of government for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfully
battled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization was
invited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of State
rights. The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper,
the way is open for the obliteration of the States in all their
essential functions and the erection of a Federal Government more
powerful than anything of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream.

When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said of
Woodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather
than by character. He was favored of the gods. He possessed a bright,
forceful mind. His achievements were thrust upon him. Though it
sometimes ran away with him, his