cumstantially unattainable by those whose popularity he courts. In playing the demagogue he abandons the gentleman, and sacrifices taste to lust of power.

The demagogue has always much to say of the rights of the people, with either the obvious implication or expressed assertion that the many, rozó, do not enjoy them, because of the unjust infringement and perpetual interference of the few, aprot. This is an exceedingly plausible and palatable species of flattery, for nothing is pleasanter to the human heart than the consciousness of rights, or any avenue to human passion more certain than an appeal to their instinct of justice. Men are but children of a larger growth, and you may perceive even in a child the swelling consciousness of personal rights and virtuous indignation, against real or supposed infringements. "The rights of man," the natural, unalienable, universal rights of man, without any close or philosophical explanation of their origin, or necessary or conventional limitations-these form the staple of the demagogue. What is abstract and original is simple and easily apprehensible by the popular mind, and impressive on the popular heart. On the contrary, the concrete, actual relation of things, modified by a thousand influences and circumstances, are hard to be understood, escape popular observation, and are unsuited to popular impression. This is true, though contrary to the loose ideas of many philosophers, so called. The difference in this case is like that which holds between simple and composite forces. One is obvious at once; the other requires nice and sometimes intricate calculations, which few are able or willing to make. In the region of simple forces, abstract rights and general principles, the demagogue finds the materials of his flattery the more palatable as it attributes to his dupes, by indirection, peculiar powers of penetration. In this department, if he is disposed to be reckless, he can, by bold and sweeping asseverations and appeals to the passions, carry with him the voices of the multitude, against all the soberer influences of the conservative philosopher or cautious statesman. When the demagogue is intelligent, as to some extent he must be to gain power, there is peculiar malignity in this species of flattery. Some of the rights he advocates, he knows can only exist in

a primitive state. Many of the evils he exposes are necessarily incident to advancing civilization, and the imperfect adjustment of the social machinery to the changes it produces. Yet impression, not truth, being his object, and flattery, not instruction, his instrument, he conceals what he knows. Fully satisfied of the falsity of his position, and with a thorough contempt for the credulity on which he practices, what does he care so that he gains his purpose? He calls the people blessed; they give him their applause or if need be, their suffrages. We grant there may be truth in much that is said by the demagogue. The most ingenious flatterer must be plausible to be palatable. "There is power with the people." This is true. Fearful elements of power for good or evil, physical power sufficient to overturn any existing institution, civil or social, brute force enough to arrest any established course of affairs, exist with the masses, as terrible demonstrations in ancient and modern times evince. There is also wisdom with the people, and virtue in many instances purer than in those of more intellectual cultivation. The people have rights, too, which in all ages and in almost every land have been trampled on and despised. The inward consciousness on the part of the people of the truth of these generalities, gives potency to the flatteries of the demagogue, who uses these truisms with colorings and exaggerations annexed for his own purposes. He expands a grain of truth to make plausible a host of fallacies, as the gold-beater uses an ounce of gold for miles of leaf, or the inventor of the sugarcoated pill renders palatable by a sweet texture the otherwise nauseous dose. The chosen agencies of the demagogue are gilded fallacies and sugar-coated poison.

The demagogue is the deceiver as well as flatterer of the people. He flatters to deceive. "The leaders of this people cause them to err." By flattery they are first led to erroneous ideas, and then, as a sure result, sooner or later to improper practice. Erroneous sentiment, however apparently removed from the practical concerns of life, with more or less rapidity and power, according to circumstances, develops itself in action. The erroneous principles propagated by the philosophers who preceded the first French Revolution, for example, had their terrible but perfectly legitimate practical development in the scenes of car

Of those who

nage, confusion and anarchy that succeeded. "sowed the wind" some lived to "reap the whirlwind," desolated by the storm they raised, but could not restrain. So, again, the principles of communism and socialism, in which the more recent Revolution in that same country originated, and which the flatterers of the people made almost universal by means of journalism, had their practical development in scenes which the true sons of liberty deplore, and the friends of despotism hailed with fiendish exultation. Hear testimony from a Frenchman on this point. "Another cause for the late civil war," (he is speaking of that which preceded and attended the new republican demonstration,*) "must be sought in the extravagant flattery heaped on the people. Magistrates, political writers, even priests, shouted incessantly, Great is the people. The people are disinterested, devoted, generous. They have all virtues; make the noblest sacrifices. Honor to the people. They are everything. They fulfill the sublime precepts of Christ.' The poor laborers, deceived by these perfidious flatterers, imagined they were almost gods. If the praises of courtiers intoxicate kings and push them into follies, much more must these flatteries turn the hearts of illiterate people, who take for undoubted truth this hypocritical language." There it is, just as theory would lead us to anticipate. The people first flattered into erroneous opinions, are then easily led astray to the commission of crime.

Let us see more in detail how flattery leads to error and crime. Take, by way of illustration, the principle, "with the people there is power." By means of this plausible and palatable abstraction, an ingenious demagogue can cause a people to adopt the erroneous sentiment, that the possession of power implies the right to exert it. What the people are able to do and resolve to do, they ought to do. Resistance to the popular will is treason against the majesty of the people. Thus the flatterers of the people cause them to err; and when the blind giant feels his strength, woe to his victim.

Again: "Kings and governments have usurped and trampled

• So rapid are events that between the transmission of the MS. of this article and its publication, the "republic" is an empire. The author is entitled to the benefit of this confirmation of his views. EDS.

upon the rights of the people." This is true.

History is full There is a great

of demonstration, from Nimrod to Napoleon. principle on this point, which it took the world a long time to learn. At the transition-period, when the latent truth becomes apparent and its consequences to be elucidated, the characteristic arts of the demagogue have full scope. After it has been demonstrated, that power is not with kings, one of two courses may be adopted: First, to direct men's thoughts upward to God as the fountain of power; or, second, downward to the masses. For if power does not by Divine right and hereditary transmission exist with kings and dynasties, where does it reside? Either with God or with the people! It emanates either from the Eternal throne, or from the will and passions of the masses. Of these alternatives it is obvious which is most flattering and which will be adopted by the deceiver. The glorious rebels and regicides of Old England failed, at this point, to make right distinctions, much more the French Atheists and their admirers and successors ever since. The retributive rewards of honoring God as king of nations, and his appointed mediatorial Governor, are dim and shadowy compared with the palpable and present rewards of flattering the people. Hence demagogues in practice are found even among professing Christians, who carry out their principles everywhere but in politics. There are those who go to the communion table and then deny the mediatorial government of the Lord Jesus Christ over men and nations, and place the diadem snatched from the heads of earthly monarchs on the sovereign people! After the same manner, also, the demagogue uses the truism that the people have wisdom and virtue. He flatters by exaggeration in order to deceive. Because the people have common sense he persuades them that they are more competent to decide questions of morality, theology and jurisprudence, than those who have devoted their lives to these studies. The demagogue is always fierce against learning and precedents, for the obvious reason that he knows they are against him. Against these, therefore, he declaims loudly and long in all departments. He decries the power of authority and vituperates as superfluous the fixed acquisitions of the past. He antagonizes especially with classes or professional men of

all kinds, denouncing them as nuisances because he knows their power of counteraction to himself:

"No rogue e'er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law."

From their peculiar position, elements and opportunities of influence, the ministry have ever been the objects of special aversion to the deceivers of the people. The slang of such men is something after this sort. "The clergy! they are recluses, ignorant of men and things, entrenched in prejudice, wedded to dogmas, opposed to progress, special allies and paid auxiliaries of the aristocratical and oppressive classes." If we believe the demagogue, though he does not believe himself, those who are excluded by circumstances from the leisure and opportunity of study and reflection, and who, in each generation start without knowing what their predecessors have attained, are better acquainted with the science of government, the nature and necessities of the social structure, or the abstruse truths of religion, than those whose time and energies have been undistractedly devoted to these investigations. The rich, as a class, blest with appliances and opportunities of mental culture denied to others; the learned, usually modest in proportion to their acquisitions, conservatives who are cautious in proportion to acquaintance with the pregnant precedents of the past, are all scouted as obstructives to the progress, and enemies to the manifest destinies of man. Is it strange, as history attests in every age, that by these flatteries the leaders of the people cause them to err; that they come to believe that "vox populi" is indeed "vox Dei;" that "they are the people and wisdom will die with them;" that as the people have power, all government is an unrighteous interference; that as man's right to the soil is natural and inviolable, property is an interference; and that, but for the existence and influence of privileged classes, and the natural oppressors of the race, ere this, the woes of humanity would have ceased, and happiness and harmonies have pervaded regenerated earth? By such means, the deceived people are turned away from the true sources and supports of human wretchedness, which in all ages and countries are principally human passion and depravity, and led to