auctioning of victory; Caesar won, and established a popular dictatorship.
Aristocrats killed him, but ended by accepting the dictatorship of his
grandnephew and stepson Augustus (27 B.C.). Democracy ended,
monarchy was restored; the Platonic wheel had come full turn.
We may infer, from these classic examples, that ancient democracy,
corroded with slavery, venality, and war, did not deserve the name, and
offers no fair test of popular government. In America democracy had a
wider base. It began with the advantage of a British heritage: Anglo-Saxon
law, which, from Magna Carta onward, had defended the citizens against
the state; and Protestantism, which had opened the way to religious and
mental liberty. The American Revolution was not only a revolt of colonials
against a distant government; it was also an uprising of a native middle
class against an imported aristocracy. The rebellion was eased and
quickened by an abundance of free land and a minimum of legislation. Men
who owned the soil they tilled, and (within the limits of nature) controlled
the conditions under which they lived, had an economic footing for
political freedom; their personality and character were rooted in the earth. It
was such men who made Jefferson [Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)]
president–Jefferson who was as skeptical as Voltaire and as revolutionary
as Rousseau. A government that governed least was admirably suited to
liberate those individualistic energies that transformed America from a
wilderness to a material utopia, and from the child and ward to the rival and
guardian of Western Europe. And while rural isolation enhanced the
freedom of the individual, national isolation provided liberty and security
within protective seas. These and a hundred other conditions gave to
America a democracy more basic and universal than history had ever seen.
Many of these formative conditions have disappeared. Personal isolation
is gone through the growth of cities. Personal independence is gone through
the dependence of the worker upon tools and capital that he does not own,
and upon conditions that he cannot control. War becomes more consuming,
and the individual is helpless to understand its causes or to escape its
