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[187] have lost their power. The cant of democracy upon the lips of men who are living down its principles is, to an earnest mind, wellnigh insufferable. Pertinent were the queries of Eliphaz the Temanite, ‘Shall a man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Shall he reason with unprofitable talk, or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?’ Enough of wearisome talk we have had about ‘progress,’ the rights of ‘the masses,’ the ‘dignity of labor,’ and ‘extending the area of freedom’! ‘Clear your mind of cant, sir,’ said Johnson to Boswell; and no better advice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians. Work out your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with your sentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details of your duty as men and Christians. What avail your abstract theories, your hopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings? A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine of human equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time gives its direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression on which the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name it disgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place in heaven. We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on this subject. Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins against humanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their own shame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy. There is a cutting severity in the answer
Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
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