Representative government, our modern fetish, was not unjustly rated by J. J. Rousseau, when he said “that a people with a representative government were slaves except during the period of elections, when they were sovereigns.” France to-day is a striking illustration.[26] An amusing incident is related by Leroy Beaulieu of a Neapolitan who hired donkeys to tourists. He was an eager advocate of representative government in 1869. Questioned as to his reasons, he said that since twenty-one years he had been hiring donkeys to English, French, and American tourists, who enjoyed representative governments and were all rich. Some years later the eminent economist met him again, and congratulated him on Italy’s having acquired a representative constitution. The disabused peasant bitterly denounced the new regime in that the burden of taxation had trebled, and that the very donkey he hired out was taxed. If the laws, or at least all important ones, were submitted to untrammelled public vote, then only might we say that the government was truly representative. In many cases universal suffrage means the tyranny of ignorant, unprincipled majorities, while nowhere can it oppose an effective barrier against the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, and the creation of all-powerful oligarchies. When the majorities and the oligarchies come into collision, liberty will succumb. There will be more than one Bridge of Sighs. It is in vain that false philosophers would persuade us that altruism, some vague “moral element of Christianism,” will combine with rationalism and perpetuate our Christian civilization in some transcendent form. Christian civilization and morality are intimately and indissolubly connected with Christian dogma. The Fatherhood of God, Jupiter Optimus, was not unknown to the ancients, but the brotherhood of man, involving personal liberty and also civil liberty by extension, is essentially a Christian predicate, and is based on the dogma of the Incarnation. The lofty contempt our modern rationalists express for the fierce controversy waged over two Greek vowels by the partisans of _Homoousion_ and _Homoiousion_ merely betrays their ignorance of its vital importance. On that dogma, so nobly maintained by the See of Peter and Athanasius, rests our whole fabric of Christian civilization, the brotherhood of man, and its logical sequence, freedom from slavery.