ore natural for people whose education has been
neglected than to spell evolution with an initial "r." A great man
struggling with the storms of fate has been called a sublime spectacle;
but surely a great man wrestling with these new forces that have come
into the world, mastering them and controlling them to beneficent ends,
would be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were it
would be only a better school of manhood, a nobler scope for ambition. I
have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing
itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and
consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of
mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of
life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct--to
endanger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the
real gravamen of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself
generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most
inconvenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the
powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this
inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited by it.

Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really
is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain
thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill
darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins.
Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely
to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must
stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there
is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.
President Lincoln defined democracy to be "the government of the people
by the people for the people." This is a sufficiently compact statement
of it as a political arrangement. Theodore Parker said that "Democracy
meant not 'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.'" And
this is the ethical conception of it, necessary as a complement of the
other; a conception which, could it be made actual and practical, would
easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social
economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the
beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for
answering w