XXXll 
INTRO D UCTION. 
on Democracy, in his study of it in America did not perceive 
this danger, which, in truth, did not then exist ; but anot er 
French writer, M. Dupont-WTiite, who unites profoundness of 
thought with a brilliant and original style, makes the danger 
clearly appear by citing a letter of Macaulay’s, which reads h e 
a prophecy. 
In this letter, dated the 23rd of May, 1857, and addressed 
to an American, Macaulay says, that though for the moment 
the immense tracts of unoccupied land in America may serve 
to stave off the evil day, yet the time would come when the 
rapid increase of population would produce the same economic 
conditions there as here, the same crises, stoppages of work, 
lowering of wages, and strikes, and that then the democratic 
institutions of America would be put to the test. What will 
the issue be ? “ It is quite plain,” he says, “ that your Govern 
ment will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented 
majority, for with you the majority is the Government, and has 
the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. 
And then he adds :— 
“The day will come when, in the State of New York a multitude of 
■«11 
preferred by the working man who hears his children crying for more 
bread? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of 
adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperUy from 
returning. Either some Cæsar or Napoleon will seize the reins of Govern- 
ment with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered 
and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman 
Empire was in the fifth ; with this difference-that the Huns and Vandals 
who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns 
and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country and by 
vniir own institutions. 
Macaulay wrote this twenty-seven years ago. We must not 
forget that the Greek democracies passed through similar trials 
and perished.