despotism of the future—that despotism which may consist with democratical institutions, and which may prove to be the most terrible of all tyrannies. You will scarcely fail to detect this tendency in the conversation of these men, who sometimes possess more of University cultivation than knowledge of the Constitution of England or experience of life. You will hear them speak with approbation of the most sweeping and compulsory measures; you will find them betraying a contempt for individual freedom, and a readiness to sacrifice the rights of persons, however sacred, to the interests of the “sovereign people,” represented by an arbitrary, centralized, imperial government. Sheltered under the idea of the sovereignty of the people, they find it possible to foster many a project destructive of individual freedom. It is to be feared that when such persons come into positions of power they will carry out these tendencies into practice. Adopting all the institutions of a democratical community as their basis, thereby appealing to your sympathy and winning your confidence, they will (not wilfully perhaps, but through a natural love of domination, or from mere thoughtlessness and immaturity of mind)[103] contribute to reduce their republic of the future to that state of society described by De Tocqueville—a man who fully acquiesced in and sympathized with the republican development of his day, but saw its dangers. “The supreme power in such a democracy,” he says, “extends its arm over the whole community; it covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened and made weak; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupifies a people; ... it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.—I think,” he says elsewhere, “that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories.... I have been led to think that the nations of Christendom will perhaps eventually undergo some sort of oppression like that which hung over several of the nations of the ancient world.”[104] A Greek sage observed long ago that the strongest oligarchies are those which in themselves were democratical. The possibility of such a future despotism need not however be regarded with dread by a people long trained to freedom, and watchful for the interests of all. I believe that we may escape subjection to this despotism of the future, which is shadowed forth in the crude and anomalous theories of the politicians to whom I have