delanceyplace.com 06/08/06 - british against democracy

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In today's excerpt - some ideas come hard.  It is 1895, 120 years after the onset of the American Revolution,  Robert Cecil Lord Salisbury, serving as Prime Minister of Great Britain for the third time, is still firmly against the idea of a democracy.  In this regard, among the leaders of Britain, he was not an exception:

"He fought all proposals designed to increase the political power of the masses. Against growing demand at that time for a new Reform law to extend the suffrage, Lord Robert Cecil, as he then was, had declared it to be the business of the Conservative party to preserve the rights and privileges of the propertied class as the 'single bulwark' against the weight of numbers. ... He believed the workings of democracy to be dangerous to liberty, for under democracy 'passion is not the exception but the rule' and it was 'perfectly impossible' to commend farsighted passionless policy to 'men whose minds are unused to thought and undisciplined to study.'

"He did not believe in political equality.  There was the multitude. he said, and there were 'natural' leaders.  'Always wealth, in some countries birth, in all countries intellectual power and culture mark out the man to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.' "