suffrage would have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power-loom,
the threshing-machine and the Gregorian calendar; and it would have
restored the Stuarts. The theory of democracy--_vox populi vox dei_--is
a pure superstition, a belief in a divine or natural sanction which does
not exist. And superstition is usually obstructive. 'We erect the
temporary watchwords of evanescent politics into eternal truths; and
having accepted as platitudes the paradoxes of our fathers, we
perpetuate them as obstacles to the progress of our children.'[1]

4. A more serious danger is that of vexatious and inquisitive tyranny.
This is exercised partly through public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent,
anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who
is not content to be the average man. But partly it is seen in constant
interference with the legislature and the executive. No one can govern
who cannot afford to be unpopular, and no democratic official can afford
to be unpopular. Sometimes he has to wink at flagrant injustice and
oppression; at other times a fanatical agitation compels him to pass
laws which forbid the citizen to indulge perfectly harmless tastes, or
tax him to contribute to the pleasures of the majority. In many ways a
Russian under the Tsars was far less interfered with than an Englishman
or American or Australian.

5. But the two diseases which are likely to be fatal to democracy are
anarchy and corruption. A democratic government is almost necessarily
weak and timid. A democracy cannot tolerate a strong executive for fear
of seeing the control pass out of the hands of the mob. The executive
must be unarmed and defenceless. The result is that it is at the mercy
of any violent and anti-social faction. No civilised government has ever
given a more ludicrous and humiliating object-lesson than the Cabinet
and House of Commons in the years before the war, in face of the