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more. Positivism is not a religion merely for Professors, Scientists, Physicians, Barristers at Law, and Literary men. It satisfies the wants, intellectual and moral, of some of such, we know; but it is capable of satisfying the more varied wants of human beings of all callings in all ranks of life. It is a religion for proletaries, their wives and families; and, as has already been stated, for those even who have ceased to be respectworthy-if it cannot ransom and redeem such it is condemned by that fact. It can be preached in high or low places, from University pulpits and the humblest Conventicles by those who are fired with true religious zeal. It can satisfy the Philosopher and improve his mind and heart in the same way that it improves the minds and hearts of common people. It meets the aspirations of the highest and gives consolation and strength to the humblest. It is destined to be the universal religion, for it has the universality of Fetichism, the order and sobriety of Theocracy, the beauty of Polytheism, and the individual holiness and goodness of Catholicism, with a superadded disinterestedness in its ideal which Roman Catholicism never had. Humanity is not one, but manifold, she represents not one, not even all nations, but all mankind. Only the unworthy are exempt from incorporation with Her, none others are excluded.

THE TRUE DEMOCRACY,

BY

FRANK W. WALTERS.

THE TRUE DEMOCRACY.1

DEMOCRACY means government by the people. And to many persons it is a word of terror. To them democracy means everything that is dangerous in social life. Government by a king or an aristocracy they can understand. In king or nobles they recognize a fixed authority capable of controlling the masses of the people, disciplining them into obedience, and shooting them down in the streets if ever they dare to rise in rebellion. They can understand such a condition of things; but government by the people means, to them, anarchy, dissolution of social bonds, and overthrow of every recognized authority. In short, democracy means revolution,-the opening of the floodgates to the unchecked tide of human passion. They say "It is the people who are to be governed. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the people in order. And how can this end be reached, but by an authority distinct from the people themselves?"

Now, it seems to me a most rational doctrine that the various forms of governmental authority are providential means, whereby the people are being slowly prepared, through the discipline of centuries, to govern themselves. The growth of a nation is often compared to the growth of an individual man. The parental care of infancy,

I" A lecture delivered before the Working Men's Liberal Club, Preston.

the training of the school, the dreary years of apprenticeship, are all appointed for the very purpose of making the man equal to the task of wise self-government, when he leaves home and school, and enters upon the real work of his life. And, if I read history aright, this is also true of the growth of communities. I most readily grant that even such abhorrent forms of social life as slavery and polygamy had their uses in the days of human childhood. Slavery was a merciful substitute for the slaughter of captives taken in war; and polygamy rendered ample protection to women in the barbarous days when might was right. But we have grown out of those infantile conditions of social life; and to introduce slavery and polygamy into modern civilization would be an infinite curse and a retrogression from those advanced posts of progress which we have gained through so many ages of strife and toil. In the same way, I believe in the divine right of kings during that period of human development when monarchy is the only form of government capable of holding the nation together. I believe in the divine right of the nursery for the infant; I believein the divine right of the school for the boy. But I also believe in the divine right of freedom and selfgovernment for the full grown man. And, if monarchy rightly discharges its functions, then I am sure that the time will come when the crown, the throne and the sceptre will be regarded as the relics of the infancy of mankind, useful as the hobby horse and the picture book are to the baby, the means by which nations have been

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