There is a marked contrast between the positions of men's minds at the end of this century and at the end of the last. Then, men of all classes were eager for reform, and full of hope. Confident of the native goodness of the human race, they thought to secure its liberty and happiness, by correcting, or rather by annihilating, the institutions of the past, which had produced the slavery and distress of the people. "Man was born free,"cried Rousseau, "yet everywhere he is in fetters." The eighteenth century and the French revolution replied: "We will break their fetters, and over the fragments shall reign universal liberty. The nations are brothers;tyrants alone arm them against each other. We will overthrow the oppressors, and the fraternity of nations shall be established." Intoxicated with these flattering illusions, men looked for a new era of justice and prosperity for an emancipated and restored human race. Now, also, we speak of reforms;but it is with a gloomy heart, for we have but a feeble trust in the final efficacy of our endeavours. Caste and its privileges are abolished; the principle of the equality of all in the eye of the law is everywhere proclaimed;the suffrage is bestowed on all; and still there is a cry for equality of conditions. We thought we had but the difficulties of the political order to solve, and now the social question rises with its gloomy abysses.
Tyrants are banished; thrones are overturned, or the kings who sit on them are bound down by constitutions, which for the most part they respect;but instead of the quarrels of prices or dynastic rivalries, we now have a far more formidable source of war, -- the enmity of races, which arms whole nations for the struggle. If no new breath of Christian charity and social justice come to calm all these hatreds, Europe, amid the struggles of class with class and race with race, is threatened with universal chaos.
Tocqueville has shewn, and every day there are fresh facts to confirm his predictions, that all nations are irresistibly impelled towards democracy, and yet democracy seems to produce nothing but strife, disorder, and anarchy.
Democratic institutions thrust themselves upon us, and yet we cannot firmly establish them. Thus the same thing seems at once inevitable and unattainable.
How to reconcile absolute liberty with the maintenance of established order in society, and how to enable the inequality of conditions, which is declared to be necessary, to exist side by side with the political equality which is conferred, is the formidable problem which modern societies must solve under pain of perishing like those of ancient times.
Democracy leads us to the verge of a precipice, is the cry of conservatives;-- and they are right. Either you must establish a more equitable division of property and produce, or the fatal end of democracy will be despotism and decadence, after a series of social struggles of which the horrors committed in Paris in 1871 may serve as a foretaste.
Under the influence of Christianity, all men are with blind improvidence proclaimed equal before the law, and the suffrage is actually granted to all, which enables the masses to name their legislators, and so to frame their laws. At the same time, economists reiterate that all property is the result of labour; and yet as before, under the empire of existing institutions, those who labour have no property and with difficulty gain the bare means of existence, while those who do not labour live in opulence and own the soil. As the former class compose the great majority, how can they be prevented from using some day the preponderance at their disposal in an endeavour to alter the laws which regulate the distribution of wealth so as to carry into practice the maxim of St Paul: " qui non laborat, nec manducet "?
