The tyranny of democracy is, as Mill insists, the most formidable, searching, and irresistible of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy, public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if ill-defined limits. The patriots of Virginia proclaimed in 1775 that any who dared 'by speech or writing to maintain' Royalist or Constitutional views should be treated as an enemy of his country. A similar ban was put some fifty years ago upon the Abolitionists of Illinois and Connecticut. A time came when it was almost equally dangerous to maintain the constitutional doctrines which the Abolitionists had assailed. Nowadays, of actual persecution there is little, because there is little need; because the repression acts, save with the most independent, original and contradictious tempers, upon thought rather than expression. No human intellect or character can resist the universal, insensible, unconscious, pressure of the atmosphere which surrounds it from the cradle. Upon certain political, social, and ethical dogmas, wherever national pride and democratic prejudice are touched, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the 'unanimous opinion' of the North and West has demoralized or extinguished thought itself.
Demos is not only tyrant but Pope. He feels, and his courtiers venture openly to claim for him, not only the royalty which can do no wrong, but the infallibility which can define right and wrong themselves. He resents, we are told upon democratic authority, all pretension to special knowledge.
'No observer of American polities' (Mr. Godkin admits in his reply to Sir Henry Maine) 'can deny that, with regard to matters which can become the subject of legislation, the American voter listens with extreme impatience to anything which has the air of instruction; but the reason is to be found not in his dislike of instruction so much as his dislike in the political field of anything which savours of superiority. The passion for equality is one of the very strongest influences in American politics. This is so fully recognized now by politicians, that self-depreciation, even in the matter of knowledge, has become one of the ways of commending one's self to the multitude, which even the foremost men of both parties do not disdain. In talking on such subjects as the currency, with a view of enlightening the people, skilful orators are very careful to repudiate all pretence of knowing anything more about the matter than their hearers. The speech is made to wear as far as possible the appearance of being simply a reproduction of things with which the audience is just as familiar as the speaker. Nothing is more fatal to a stump orator than an air of superior wisdom on any subject. He has, if he means to persuade, to keep carefully, in outward seeming at all events, on the same intellectual level as those whom he is addressing. Orators of a demagogic turn, of course, push this caution to its extreme, and often affect ignorance, and boast of the smallness of the educationale opportunities enjoyed by them in their youth, and of the extreme difficulty they had in acquiring even the little they know. There is nothing, in fact, people are less willing to tolerate in a man, who seek office at their hands, than any sign that he does not consider himself as belonging to the same class as the bulk of the voters--that either birth, or fortune, or education has taken him out of sympathy with them, or caused him, in any sense, to look down on them.'