denunciation of them, which he knew must prove futile. Guizot said of De
Tocqueville, that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Mr. Mill
was too penetrated by popular sympathies to be an aristocrat in De
Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which
the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without
chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started.
Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on
the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted
that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong
man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the
master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell
us.
Now Mr. Mill's doctrine laid down the main condition of finding your
hero; namely, that all ways should be left open to him, because no man,
nor majority of men, could possibly tell by which of these ways their
deliverers were from time to time destined to present themselves. Wits
have caricatured all this, by asking us whether by encouraging the tares
to grow, you give the wheat a better chance. This is as misleading as
such metaphors usually are. The doctrine of liberty rests on a faith
drawn from the observation of human progress, that though we know wheat
to be serviceable and tares to be worthless, yet there are in the great
seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and
not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity of
assuring ourselves. If you are too eager to pluck up the tares, you are
very likely to pluck up with them these untried possibilities of human
excellence, and you are, moreover, very likely to injure the growing
wheat as well. The demonstration of this lies in the recorded experience
of mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account