tive
comes by cause," as Polonius said long ago. It is only by instigation of
the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent
and dangerous. It is then only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It
is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts
of intelligence:--

"The wicked and the weak rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion."

Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much
heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the
guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and
secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain
sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither.
It is only when the reasonable and practicable are denied that men demand
the unreasonable and impracticable: only when the possible is made
difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are
made out of the dreams of the poor. No; the sentiment which lies at the
root of democracy is nothing new. I am speaking always of a sentiment, a
spirit, and not of a form of government; for this was but the outgrowth
of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is merely an expression
of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be a controlling
hand, in the management of their own affairs. What is new is that they
are more and more gaining that control, and learning more and more how to
be worthy of it. What we used to call the tendency or drift--what we are
being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things--has for some
time been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in
arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east
wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent
will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some
people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are
conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a
metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive
one home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet comes of what nurses
and other experienced persons call growing-pains, and need not seriously
alarm us. They are what every generation before us--certainly every
generation since the invention of printing--has gone through with more or
less good fortune. To the door of every generation there comes