'The supremacy of the people's will' is the second idea. _Vox Populi, vox Dei!_ What the people decree is right, and nothing must stand between their will and the subject or object upon which it operates! Such is the political gospel according to democracy, and fifty years' earnest proclamation thereof has wellnigh abolished all the barriers of constitutionalism--barriers, which stood like faithful guardians, stern but just, between the Individual and the State, which reconciled the harmonious coexistence of private liberty and public power--an idea wholly unknown in pagan or classic civilization--and which at once prevented the anarchy of individualism and the tyranny of absolutism. But true it is, whatever a people constantly assert they come to believe, and whatever they believe will at last crystallize itself in action. And thus, with the oft-repeated and ever-increasing assertion that 'man is his own end,' and 'is sufficient unto himself,' and with that other assertion that the will of the people is law and must act directly upon its object, we have gradually lost out of mind the true significance of the constitutional system. Those numberless intermediary institutions--which logically _grew_ out of the Christian idea of mediation, as the oak naturally grows out of the acorn, and which wonderfully reconciled liberty with authority, freedom with order, the finite with the infinite--have become more and more obsolete, and less and less understood. They have crumbled away like the stately columns of a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead branches that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must be removed--relics of monarchy or aristocracy, cunningly devised inventions of priestcraft or kingcraft, that retard the triumph of democracy.