James Russell Lowell, Among my books

[107] divined that the surest stay of order, as of practical wisdom, is habit, which is a growth, and cannot be made offhand. He believed with Aristotle that vigorous minds were intended by nature to rule,¹ and that certain races, like certain men, are born to leadership.² He calls democracies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (tyrannides) ‘oblique policies which drive the human race to slavery, as is patent in all of them to one who reasons.’³ He has nothing but pity for mankind when it has become a many-headed beast, ‘despising the higher intellect irrefragable in reason, the lower which hath the face of experience.’⁴ He had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the divine right of I'm as good as you. He thought it fatal to all discipline: ‘The confounding of persons hath ever been the beginning of sickness in the state.’⁵ It is the same thought which Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Ulysses:—

Degree being vizarded,
     The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask,
. . . . When degree is shaked,
     Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick.

⁶ Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he had a high sense of the worth of freedom, whether in thought or government. He represents, indeed, the very object of his journey through the triple realm of shades as a search after liberty.⁷ But it must not be that scramble after undefined and indefinable rights which ends always in despotism, equally degrading whether crowned with a red cap or an imperial diadem. His theory of