Latter-Day Pamphlets | Page 6

absconds; and from end to end of
Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more

irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on
what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most
inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin
earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements
everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite
or give signal to such revolutions--students, young men of letters,
advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly
bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the
millions and blowing it into flame,--might give rise to reflections as to
the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost
children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time since
the word Senior (Seigneur, or _Elder_) was first devised to signify
"lord," or superior;--as in all languages of men we find it to have been!
Not an honorable document this either, as to the spiritual condition of
our epoch. In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be
venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble: in times that love
something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no wisdom, and
see little or none to love, the old man will cease to be venerated; and
looking more closely, also, you will find that in fact he has ceased to be
venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy
without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young boys. In
these days, what of lordship or leadership is still to be done, the youth
must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened into
sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own frigid cautious,
avarices, mean timidities; and can lead no-whither towards an object
that even seems noble. But to return.
This mad state of matters will of course before long allay itself, as it
has everywhere begun to do; the ordinary necessities of men's daily
existence cannot comport with it, and these, whatever else is cast aside,
will have their way. Some remounting--very temporary remounting--of
the old machine, under new colors and altered forms, will probably
ensue soon in most countries: the old histrionic Kings will be admitted
back under conditions, under "Constitutions," with national Parliaments,
or the like fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life will
try to begin again. But there is now no hope that such arrangements can
be permanent; that they can be other than poor temporary makeshifts,
which, if they try to fancy and make themselves permanent, will be

displaced by new explosions recurring more speedily than last time. In
such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and
conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must
European Society continue swaying, now disastrously tumbling, then
painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals,--till once the new
rock-basis does come to light, and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and
of need to mutiny, abate again!
For universal Democracy, whatever we may think of it, has declared
itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we live; and he who has
any chance to instruct, or lead, in his days, must begin by admitting that:
new street-barricades, and new anarchies, still more scandalous if still
less sanguinary, must return and again return, till governing persons
everywhere know and admit that. Democracy, it may be said
everywhere, is here:--for sixty years now, ever since the grand or First
French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all the
world; in message after message, some of them very terrible indeed;
and now at last all the world ought really to believe it. That the world
does believe it; that even Kings now as good as believe it, and know, or
with just terror surmise, that they are but temporary phantasm
Play-actors, and that Democracy is the grand, alarming, imminent and
indisputable Reality: this, among the scandalous phases we witnessed
in the last two years, is a phasis full of hope: a sign that we are
advancing closer and closer to the very Problem itself, which it will
behoove us to solve or die; that all fighting and campaigning and
coalitioning in regard to the existence of the Problem, is hopeless and
superfluous henceforth. The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt, nor
body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise. Democracy,
sure enough, is here; one knows not how long it will keep hidden
underground even in Russia;--and here in England, though we object to
it resolutely in the form of street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes,
and decidedly will not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its
million feet is on all streets and thoroughfares,