order; accordingly the malcontents are restrained.  But with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always in a minority, absolutely at its mercy.  The day will come when the multitude of people, none of whom has had more than a half a breakfast, or expects to have more than a half a dinner, will choose a legislature.  Is it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be chosen?  On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of the public faith; and on the other a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries:  which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working-man who hears his children cry for more bread?  There will be, I fear, spoliation.  The spoliation will increase the distress; the distress will produce fresh spoliation.  There is nothing to stop you; your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.  Either civilization or liberty will perish.  Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth.”

I do not deny that there is great force in Macaulay’s reasoning and prophecy.  History points to decline and ruin when public virtue has fled and government is in the hands of demagogues; for their reign has ever been succeeded by military usurpers who have preserved civilization indeed, but at the expense of liberty.  Yet this reasoning applies not only to America but to England as well,—­especially since, by the Reform Bill and subsequent enactments of Parliament, she has opened the gates to an increase of suffrage, which now threatens to become universal.  The enfranchisement of the people—­the enlarged powers of the individual under the protection and control of the commonwealth—­is the Anglo-Saxon contribution to progress.  It is dangerous.  So is all power until its use is learned.  But there is no backward step possible; the tremendous experiment must go forward, for England and America alike.

Macaulay himself was one of the most prominent of English statesmen and orators, in 1830, 1831, and 1832, to advocate the extension of the right of suffrage and the increase of popular liberties.  All his writings are on the side of liberty in England; and all are in opposition to the Toryism which was so triumphant during the reign of George III.  Why did he have faith in the English people of England, and yet show so little in the English people of America?  He believed in political and social progress for his own countrymen; why should he doubt the utility of the same in other countries?  If vandalism is to be the fate of America, where education, the only truly conservative element, is more diffused than in England, why should it not equally triumph in that