The tyranny of democracy is, as Mill insists, the most formidable, searching, and irresistible of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy, public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if ill-defined limits. The patriots of Virginia proclaimed in 1775 that any who dared 'by speech or writing to maintain' Royalist or Constitutional views should be treated as an enemy of his country. A similar ban was put some fifty years ago upon the Abolitionists of Illinois and Connecticut. A time came when it was almost equally dangerous to maintain the constitutional doctrines which the Abolitionists had assailed. Nowadays, of actual persecution there is little, because there is little need; because the repression acts, save with the most independent, original and contradictious tempers, upon thought rather than expression. No human intellect or character can resist the universal, insensible, unconscious, pressure of the atmosphere which surrounds it from the cradle. Upon certain political, social, and ethical dogmas, wherever national pride and democratic prejudice are touched, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the 'unanimous opinion' of the North and West has demoralized or extinguished thought itself. Demos is not only tyrant but Pope. He feels, and his courtiers venture openly to claim for him, not only the royalty which can do no wrong, but the infallibility which can define right and wrong themselves. He resents, we are told upon democratic authority, all pretension to special knowledge.