The Democrat, you see, through his habit of looking at Things as They Are, had come to possess a lively sense of the ridiculous side of democracy--its inconsistencies, its unconscious enjoyment of words, its silly self-deception and placid self-satisfaction.
Now that you have seen the workings of his mind, you will easily understand, too, how the expression of his thoughts might provoke those who were always on the lookout for the red rag of aristocracy. And the fact is, that on occasion he did express his thoughts with great frankness and no little vehemence; and, as no one likes to be told his faults by even a friendly critic, he often brought the angry hornets of democracy about his ears.
Yes, and by your smiling you seem to say that he deserved it. And yet I assure you now, as I did in the beginning, that he was really a democrat. You must not mistake realization of the faults of democracy in operation for hostility to democracy itself. He had seen something of life in aristocratic countries, and was thankful above all things that there _was_ something in the atmosphere of his own land which had the effect of making men look up. This virtue alone covered a multitude of the sins of democracy. There _was_ something in his country more than the mere form of democratic society. Whether men got their rights or not, they knew they had rights, and anyone who wanted to make them consent to injustice had at least to take the trouble of giving it the appearance of justice. And not only were they possessed of a lively sense of their own rights, but the air was full of talk about other people's having _their_ rights. Generosity and benevolence were abroad in the land. It was, to be sure, something of the sort of Sidney Smith's benevolence--the feeling which A experienced when he thought B ought to do something to relieve C's necessities; but even that kind was better than none. It was vastly important whether large classes of human beings acquiesced in being regarded as cattle--as they seemed to in the Old World--or not.