impose silence upon me I will submit, because I look upon your unanimous voice to be the voice of the nation; and this I have been taught and do believe to be in some manner the voice of God." In some manner, is a very saving clause; reminding us in effect of a couplet of Pope's :

"All this may be ; the People's Voice is odd,

It is, and it is not, the voice of God."

Swift himself is careful to discriminate on another occasion, when discussing popular impeachments in Greece and Rome, and remarking that to conceive the possibility of the body of the people being mistaken was an indignity not to be imagined, till the consequences had convinced them when it was past remedy. "I should think," adds the dean, "that the saying, Vox populi vox Dei, ought to be understood of the universal bent and current of a people, not of the bare majority of a few representatives," etc. It is of imperial Rome that Corneille is treating, when he makes Cinna say, in the tragedy, that the voice of the people is never that of reason, when the people have it all their own way :

"Mais quand le peuple est maître, on n'agit qu'en tumulte ;

La voix de la raison jamais ne se consulte."

And it is with regal Rome that he has to do in another of his tragedies, where he makes Camille say, in reply to Sabine's remark on a popular tumult, that the gods have not inspired it in vain,

"Mais la voix du public n'est pas toujours leur voix.”

La Fontaine makes a query to the same effect the moral of one of his Fables. The foregoing narrative, quoth he, sufficiently proves the people to be an exceptionable sort of judge: in what sense then can it be true, what I have somewhere read, that the voice of the people is the voice of God?

"Le récit précédent suffit

Pour montrer que le peuple est juge récusable.
En quel sens donc est véritable

Ce que j'ai lu dans certain lieu,

Que sa voix est la voix de Dieu ?"

A 'COMMON CRY OF CURS!

381

Shakspeare's sturdy, stalwart old patrician, Menenius Agrippa, is a pronounced type of those who rate the voice of the populace as the reverse of divine. He is not so bitter as Coriolanus, who greets it as a common cry of curs. But he is scarcely more of a believer in its absolute or relative worth. When the tribune Brutus, stimulating the mob to reject Caius Marcius, who treats them with such arrogance, demands,

Why, shall the people give

One that speaks thus their voice?"

the candidate contemptuously answers,

I'll give my reasons,

More worthier than their voices."

And when Caius Marcius, infuriate against the Rome that has banished him, is leading a victorious army of aliens against it, burning and wasting as they come along, the reproach of old Menenius against the demagogues and the populace and their most sweet voices, takes this style:

66 You have made good work,

You and your apron men; you that stood so much
Upon the voice of occupation, and

The breath of garlic-eaters !"

You are they, he tells them, that made the air unwholesome with your hootings at this man: a most mal-odorous vox populi. Now he's coming, and will pay you for your voices. And grave Cominius backs his old friend with the exclamation, "You are goodly things, you voices!" "You have made good work, you and your cry!" is the vivacious veteran's parting sally.

The Vox Populi, Sir Archibald Alison cautiously advises us, "is not always, at the moment, the Vox Dei: it is so only when the period of action has passed, and that of reflection has arisen-when the storms of passion are hushed, and the whisperings of interest no longer heard." He iterates and reiterates the remark in divers sections of his history, as the manner of the man is. Referring to Lewis the

Sixteenth's adoption of Necker's doctrine that public opinion is always on the side of wisdom and virtue, Sir Archibald repeats the caveat: "The principle, vox populi vox Dei, doubtful at all times, is totally false in periods of agitation, when the passions are let loose, and the ambition of the reckless is awakened by the possibility of elevation. It would often be nearer the truth then to say, vox populi vox diaboli.” In another place he quotes Robespierre's characteristic assertion, that "to flatter twenty-five millions of men is as impossible as to flatter the Deity himself,” and observes that "the maxim, 'Vox populi, vox Dei,' and the belief that the masses can do no wrong, whatever individuals may do, were his [Robespierre's] ruling principles,"" and at once aided his success and sped his fall. "The maxim 'Vox populi vox Dei' is true only of the calm results of human reflection, when the period of agitation is past, and reason has resumed its sway. So predominant is passion in moments of excitation, that it too often then happens, that the voice of the people is that of the demons who direct them, and the maxim 'Vox populi vox diaboli' would often, in reality, be nearer the truth." And unfortunately, in such crises, the vox is apt to to assert itself in results as something more than a mere vox et præterea nihil.

Homer describes a demented crowd vocal and vociferous to their own damage:

"The shouting host in loud applauses join'd;

So Pallas robb'd the Many of their mind,

To their own sense condemn'd! and left to choose

The worst advice, the better to refuse."

Demetrius the cynic is quoted by Montaigne as having "pleasantly said "-in the French sense of plaisanterie-of the voice of the people, that come it from above or below, it was all the same to him. The multitude of voices, in Mr. Carlyle's sentence, is no authority; for a thousand voices may not, strictly examined, amount to one vote; and the "deep, clear consciousness of one mind," intelligent, instructed, and upright, outweighs by far the "loud outcry of a million,"

CARLYLE ON VOTES AND VOICES.

383

whose "babble" but distracts the listener. With uttermost scorn the same philosopher descants on Universal Suffrage as "the admirablest method ever imagined of counting heads and gathering indubitable votes: you will thus gather the vote, vox or voice, of all the two-legged animals without feathers in your dominion; what they think is what the gods thinkis it not?—and this you shall go and do." Mr. Carlyle would prefer the voice of a single human being, that could and would speak with power; whether backed or not by the vox populi as Cato is made to be in Ben Jonson's tragedy:

66

People. The voice of Cato is the voice of Rome.

Cato. The voice of Rome is the consent of heaven."

Perhaps the most memorable passage in which the author of "Hero Worship" has put on record his contempt for a shouting mob, merely as such, is that in stern reminder of a certain People, once upon a time, who clamorously voted by overwhelming majority, "Not He; Barabbas, not He! Barabbas is our man; Barabbas, we are for Barabbas !" Well, they got Barabbas, he goes on to say; and they got of course such guidance as Barabbas and the like of him could give them; "and, of course, they stumbled ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked way; andand, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad fortune, they prophetically sing 'Ou' clo!' in all the cities of the world." Mr. Carlyle adds a sort of monitory, minatory aspiration, Might the world, at this late hour, but take note of them, and understand their song a little !

Not that he, any more than any other large-hearted and open-minded thinker, is apt to ignore what is of weight, at times, in the voice of the people. But it is rather to their instincts than their thoughts-to their native impulses than their acquired opinions-that he challenges attention and respect. Witness what he says of the shrieks of indignation, the howl of contumely, with which the Bastille was assailed in '89. "Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest

a man encounters among the sounds and shadows which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing somewhere beyond Time." *

Philip de Commines incidentally recognizes the vox populi as vox Dei, when relating the ruin and the deaths of three kings of Arragon within a little more than one year: “I conclude, therefore, with several pious and religious men, and the general voice of the people (which is the voice of God), that God intended to make an example of these princes,” etc. And yet probably Maître Philippe would not have said nay to the blunt speech of Lord Lytton's Man of the Middle Class, that "Heaven made the people, and the devil makes three-fourths of what is popular." Shelley quotes the adage vox populi vox Dei only to apply to it what his father-in-law said of a more famous proverb, “Of some merit as a popular maxim, but totally destitute of philosophical accuracy.' The voice of the people, writes a Quarterly Reviewer, may be the voice of God when they rise as one man on some grand occasion for the just and necessary vindication of their rights; but it is difficult to recognize the Divine origin when we hear nothing but the Babel-like hubbub of corruption, selfishness, and intrigue. Coleridge speaks, in one of his earlier political essays, of the public will expressing itself at first in low and distant tones, "but if corruption deafen power [on the part of the government], gradually increasing till they swell into a deep and awful thunder, the voice of GOD, [the capitals are S. T. C's very own,] which his vicegerents must hear, and hearing dare not disobey." It must have been in remembrance of such a passage, and by way of eager disclaimer of the construction put upon it, by those who called him renegade from the liberalism of his youth, that the old man eloquent,

*Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? . . Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest operas, was the voice of the populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread !"-Carlyle: History of the French Revolution, Book v. chap. vi.