On politics I have little to say. My belief remains unchanged that true
Christianity, and true monarchy also, are not only compatible with, but
require as their necessary complement, true freedom for every man of every
class; and that the Charter, now defunct, was just as wise and as righteous
a "Reform Bill" as any which England had yet had, or was likely to have.
But I frankly say that my experience of the last five years gives me little
hope of any great development of the true democratic principle in Britain,
because it gives me little sign that the many are fit for it. Remember
always that Democracy means a government not merely by numbers of isolated
individuals, but by a Demos--by men accustomed to live in Demoi, or
corporate bodies, and accustomed, therefore, to the self-control, obedience
to law, and self-sacrificing public spirit, without which a corporate body
cannot exist: but that a "democracy" of mere numbers is no democracy,
but a mere brute "arithmocracy," which is certain to degenerate into an
"ochlocracy," or government by the mob, in which the numbers have no real
share: an oligarchy of the fiercest, the noisiest, the rashest, and the
most shameless, which is surely swallowed up either by a despotism, as in
France, or as in Athens, by utter national ruin, and helpless slavery to
a foreign invader.
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