it can possess the slightest charm for any one who has not sunk to Nana's spiritual level is inconceivable; and herein is the appalling significance of its popularity. Whether acquiescence in such Naturalism is "wise and not inglorious" is a question the answer to which must depend upon our conception of wisdom and glory. That it is the true expression of the Revolution in the domain of popular æsthetics, there can be no question whatever.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY.

It is commonly said that we are living in an age of Democracy. And this is true. It is also true that we are living in an age of commonplaces. The popular mind is fed chiefly on phrases provided by the newspapers, which constitute for the great majority their only literature. Hence words take largely the place of ideas:

"Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen,

Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein."

And one result is that words lose precise connotations and, too often, serve merely to darken counsel. Democracy is a word which has experienced this fate. In common parlance it is used in the loosest manner. Those who attach to it some definite sense, usually employ it to denote the polity in contemporary Europe which is informed by the Revolutionary dogma. Very few, probably, are aware how widely removed is that polity from everything that the world has hitherto meant by Democracy. Mr. Mill has observed in his invalu

able work on Representative Government, that "the current idea of Democracy is derived from the falsely called democracies which now prevail." Certainly, no citizen of ancient Athens, no burgher of medieval Florence, would recognise as Democracy such a polity as that which at present exists, let us say, in France. Some one-I forget who, nor does it matter-was once commending, in high terms, the philosophical merit of M. Cousin. "The Plato of our age," he said, "a nineteenth century Plato." "Yes," it was replied, "an electro-Plato." The repartee was a little hard on M. Cousin, perhaps. But it may help us to an illustration. The Revolutionary Democracy of these latter days has as much in common with the noble city autonomies of Hellas or Italy, as the ware vulgarly named after the enterprising town of Birmingham has in common with the commodities which it counterfeits.

The word Democracy in prechristian Europe, and in the Europe of the Middle Ages, denoted the rule of that comparatively small class which constituted the Suos, or populus. In those democracies, citizenship was regarded not as a natural right, but as a legal privilege, to be gained with difficulty and to be guarded with jealousy. The result of fierce struggles, and of the triumph of the most highly endowed races, they rested everywhere upon a basis of fact. And they were everywhere, even in their most popular form, essentially aristocratic. To be a burgher of ancient Athens, or of mediæval

Florence, was to have a patent of nobility. The Revolutionary Democracy of the present day, so far from resting upon prescription and privilege, like the older democracies, starts from the proposition that man, quà man, possesses all the highest attributes of citizenship. It is based upon an à priori theory of the supposed rights, innate, inalienable, and imprescriptible, of humanity in a hypothetical state of nature. It everywhere depends, whether consciously or unconsciously, upon the doctrine of man and society which Rousseau formulated, and which Robespierre sought to realise an abstract, an unrelated, an universal man: identical in all ages, in all latitudes, in all races, in all states of civilisation. It everywhere aspires, with varying degrees of vehemence, to sweep away historic institutions, with the innumerable diversities attaching to them, in order to make room for a reconstruction of the public order on the basis of arithmetic, and of what it calls pure reason. It everywhere worships what it accounts to be "abstract rights," and believes them to govern the world. In France we see it in the fullest and most logical development it has, as yet, attained. But, even in this country, as I shall have to point out more at length in the next chapter, it has made proselytes, and has embodied itself in many a cherished phrase, many an effective shibboleth. Thus, the Benthamite aspiration,

"Everybody to count for one: nobody for more than one," or the more succinct formula, "One man, one vote," is merely a translation into the vulgar tongue of Rousseau's sophism of the equivalence of all members of the community, and of their natural right to participate equally in the expression of the general will. The proposition with which the air still resounds, that "the true political creed is faith in the people,” is but a variation on the theme that "human nature is good," justly reckoned by Mr. John Morley "the central moral doctrine of the Revolution." The equally familiar thesis that the adult males of any countrythat is a majority of them told by head-however low in the scale of humanity, however devoid of the most elementary instincts and aptitudes of freemen, as, for example, in Egypt, are its sole legitimate rulers, is only the practical application of the Contrat Social. Nor is the success of this teaching difficult to understand. "Ce qui fait une puissance extraordinaire. aux idées de Rousseau," wrote M. Taine to me some time ago (I cite his luminous words by his kind permission) "c'est surtout la simplicité de la conception. Un enfant, un ouvrier croit la comprendre En effet le raisonnement publique qu'elle enfante est aussi aisé qu'une règle de trois. Comment prouver à cet homme qu'il ne comprend pas, que la notion de l'état est une des plus difficiles à former, que le raisonnement politique est hors de sa portée? Ce