Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1894 — MACAULAY’S PROPHECY. [ARTICLE]

MACAULAY’S PROPHECY.

The Historian’s Prediction as to the Downfall of Depublican Government The following letter was written by the late Lord Macaulay, the English historian, to Mr. Henry S. Randall, of New York, while the latter was engaged in writing a biography of Jefferson: “Holly Lodge, Kensington, 1 London, May 23, 1857. y “ Dear Sir —* * * You are surprised to leat*n that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am a little surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote aline, and that 1 never, in Parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings—a place where it is the fashion to court the populace—uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be intrusted to a majority of citizen’s told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty. or civilization, or both.

“In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in' twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily, the danger was averted, and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone; but civilization has been saved. I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely Democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich and civilization would perish, or order and property would be saved by a strong military government and liberty would perish. “You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, although it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundles extent of fertile and unoccupied land your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the old world, and while that is the ease the Jeffersonian policy may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity. But the time will come when New England will be as thickly populated as old England. Wages will be as lbw and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and your Birminghams. and in these Manchesters and Birming hams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another

cannot get a full. meal. > In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting; but it matters little, for here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select, of an educated class, Qf a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained, The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon beiiin to flow again; work Is plentiful; wages rise, and all is tranquility and cheerfulness. I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described. Through such seasons the United’ States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and I can not help foreboding the worst. ,It is plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when in the State of New York a multitude cf people, none of whom had more that half a breakfast or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legisture. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers and asxing why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and ride in a carriage while thousand of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more bread? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I describe,do things that will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should, iu a year of scarcity, devour all the seed corn, and thus make the next year a year not of scarcity but of absolute

famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fr'esh spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution, is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with astronghand or your republic wiH be fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman empire came from without, while your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered in your own country by your own institutions.”