omplaint, and these
experience an immediate alleviation when once they have found a sonorous
Greek name to abuse it by. There is something consolatory also,
something flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to that
conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil from our uneasy
consciousness of being commonplace, in thinking ourselves victims of a
malady by which no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they find
it simpler to class under one comprehensive heading whatever they find
offensive to their nerves, their tastes, their interests, or what they
suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as
physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross-grained fellows
lay their ill-temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment,
and, if it be, is America answerable for it? Even if she were, would it
account for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease, and bad harvests,
and bad English, and the German bands, and the Boers, and all the other
discomforts with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that
go in chariots? Yet I have seen the evil example of Democracy in America
cited as the source and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite
as little connected with it by any sequence of cause and effect. Surely
this ferment is nothing new. It has been at work for centuries, and we
are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where the
newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he
has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are more noticeable on the
surface than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of silence and
suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo Navagero, speaking of the
Provinces of Lower Austria in 1546, tells us that "in them there are five
sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of
these last no account is made, _because they have no voice in the Diet_."
[1]

Nor was it among the people that subversive or mistaken doctrines had
their rise. A Father of the Church said that property was theft many
centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it.
Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops, and of the theory
that the State owed every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself
the first organized Democracy? A few centuries ago the chief end of man
was to keep his soul alive, and then the little kernel of leaven that
sets the gases at work was