Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt онлайн

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Thus Democracy is not a “cult” to rise and rage and perish. It is not a theory that may some day be discovered false. It is not a plant to be carefully watched and watered lest peradventure it die. It is a condition, an environment, an atmosphere. A force as irresistible as that which keeps the stars a-swinging is behind it. The story of history, rightly written, would be the story of the march of Democracy, now patiently wearing away obstacles, accelerated there, now sweeping along upon the surface, again flowing for centuries underground, but always in action, always the one continuous, inevitable force. There never has been any more danger of its defeat than there has been danger that the human brain would be smoothed of its thought-bearing convolutions and set in retreat through the stages of evolution back to protoplasm.

Until this last half-century it was extremely difficult to study the operations of any great world-principle. But discovery and invention have now given us sight far more penetrating than that of the fabled giant who could see the grass grow. The difficulty now is to avoid seeing and knowing. And to shut out all but some relatively unimportant phenomenon—suddenly and suspiciously acquired wealth here, a corrupt and extravagant or degraded public administration there, a strike or a riot or a momentary moral convulsion yonder—and from it to predict the approach of chaos with tyranny upon its back, is as childish as the fantastic alarms of a tribe of savages during an eclipse or a thunder storm.