But we do not to-day maintain that those majorities had a “right” to sack cities, to violate women, to massacre, to exterminate, and to bring others into subjection. The most we say is that these happenings are an extreme, and, under some circumstances, an inevitable expression of certain bad elements in human nature. Is it not, then, perfectly absurd to imagine that under internal and domestic conditions all such bad elements have departed from majorities; and that a consensus of vice, of self-indulgence, of unfairness, of a desire for domination, may not spread through very large sections of the community, even through whole peoples where the opportunity so to indulge is accorded--especially if it be accorded by law or embodied as a State doctrine? Clearly, therefore, there must be some limitation or check imposed upon the so-called “rights” of majorities; and some of them may be limitations which those majorities would not choose for themselves, but will, all the same, submit to without revolt if they are properly rubbed home! One of the essential conditions for majority rule (if it is to carry with it any moral sanction at all) is that it must be ready to submit to the same conditions which it imposes upon others; and that it must not set up qualification, or prohibition from qualification, without any liability of that prohibition falling upon itself. It must make the liability fairly equal. The specious excuse and justification for government by majority, as put forward by the materialists, is that, latent, within it, lies the physical force of the nation. (I may say, in passing, that the physical force of the nation lies latent in every form of government which secures the assent of the governed; and only ceases to be latent when some of it gets on to its hind-legs and insists on another form of government; and to be effective, that “some of it” need not always be a majority.) But it is no use talking of physical force being the basis and the moral justification of majority rule--it is no use invoking the physical force argument--unless your majority is also prepared to go to the trouble of exercising it and paying the price for exercising it. And the main phenomenon of our present form of government by majority is that the majority won’t take any trouble at all; that, taken in the bulk, they care very little, and won’t put themselves to inconvenience--certainly won’t risk physical discomfort and pain--unless government has very seriously incommoded them by damaging or by neglecting their interests. If the physical force basis is to be your full sanction of government--if that is really your argument--then that basis, that sanction, is possessed equally by king or despot, so long as he has his organisation at his command. There are his numbers, obeying him just as, with us, M.P.’s, 700 strong, obey the party-whips, often against their principles, but from no physical compulsion whatever.