A nation in general must have learned to respect a king and a house of lords, before a king and a house of lords can exercise any authority over them. If a man or a set of men, unsanctioned by any previous prejudice in their favour, pretend to exercise sovereignty in a country, they will become objects of derision rather than of serious resistance. Destroy the existing prejudice in favour of any of our present institutions, and they will fall into similar disuse and contempt.
It has sometimes been supposed "that an army, foreign or domestic, may be sufficient to hold a people in subjection, completely against their inclination." A domestic army at least will in some degree partake of the opinions and sentiments of the people at large. The more precautions are employed to prevent the infection, the doctrine will probably spread with so much the more certainty and rapidity. Show me that you are afraid of my entertaining certain opinions or hearing certain principles, and you will infallibly, sooner or later, awaken my curiosity. A domestic army will always be found a very doubtful instrument of tyranny in a period of crisis. - A foreign army after a time will become domesticated. If the question be of importing a foreign army for the specific purpose of supporting tottering abuse, great alarm will inevitably be excited. These men, it may be, are adapted for continuing the reign of tyranny; but who will pay them? A weak, superstitious or ignorant people may be held in the chains of foreign power; but the school of moral and political independence sends forth pupils of a very different character. In the encounter with their penetration and discernment, tyranny will feel itself powerless and transitory.
In a word, either the people are unenlightened and unprepared for a state of freedom, and then the struggle and the consequences of the struggle will be truly perilous; or the progress of political knowledge among them is decisive, and then everyone will see how futile and short-lived will be the attempt to hold them in subjection, by means of garrisons and a foreign force. The party attached to liberty is, upon that supposition, the numerous one; they are the persons of true energy, and who have an object worthy of their zeal. Their oppressors, few in number, and degraded to the rank of lifeless machines, wander with no certain destination or prospect over the vast surface, and are objects of pity rather than serious alarm. Every hour diminishes their number and their resources; while, on the other hand, every moment's delay gives new strength to the cause, and fortitude to the champions, of liberty. Men would not be inclined pertinaciously to object to a short delay, if they recollected the advantages and the certainty of success with which it is pregnant. - Meanwhile these reasonings turn upon the probability that the purposes of liberty will be full as effectually answered without the introduction of force: there can be little doubt of the justifiableness of a whole nation having recourse to arms, if a case can be made out in which it shall be impossible for them to prevent the introduction of slavery in any other way.
The same reasonings, with little variation, will apply to the case of an unquestionable majority of a nation, as to that of the whole. The majority of a nation is irresistible; it as little needs to have recourse to violence;Chapter here is as little reason to expect that any usurper will be so mad as to contend with it. If ever it appear to be other wise, it is because, in one of two ways, we deceive ourselves with the term majority. First, nothing is more obvious than the danger incident to a man of a sanguine temper of overestimating the strength of his party. He associates perhaps only with persons of his own way of thinking, and a very small number appears to him as if it were the whole world. Ask persons of different tempers and habits of life how many republicans there are at this hour in England or Scotland, and you will immediately be struck with the very opposite answers you will receive. There are many errors of a sanguine temper that appear, at first sight, innocent or even useful: but surely every man of integrity and conscience will hesitate, before he suffers the possibility that an error of this sort should encourage him to plunge a nation in violence, and open a sea of blood. He must have a heart of strange composition who, for the precarious inferences he draws in moral or political calculation, would volunteer a mandate of death, or be the first to unsheath the sword of summary execution.
A second deception that lurks under the word majority lies, not in the question of number, but of quality and degree of illumination. A majority, we say perhaps, is dissatisfied with the present state of things, and wishes for such a specific alteration. Alas, it is to be feared that the greater part of this majority are often mere parrots who have been taught a lesson of the subject of which they understand little or nothing. What is it they dislike? A specific tax perhaps, or some temporary grievance. Do they dislike the vice and meanness that grow out of tyranny, and pant for the liberal and ingenuous virtue that would be fostered in their own minds in a different condition? No. They are very angry, and fancy themselves very judicious.
What is it they desire? They know not. It would probably be easy to show that what they profess to desire is little better than what they hate.
What they hate is not the general depravation of the human character; and what they desire is not its improvement. It is an insult upon human understanding, when we speak of persons in this state of infantine ignorance, to say that the majority of the nation is on the side of political renovation. Few greater misfortunes can befall any country than for such persons to be instigated to subvert existing institutions, and violently to take the work of political reformation into their own hands.
