Conservative's Consolations
portunity to make the world safe for herself. But democracy may be divorced from freedom, and freedom is the breath of man's nostrils, the strength of his sinews, the sanction of his soul. It is as painful to be tyrannized over by a proletariat as by a tsar or by a corporation, and it is in a measure more disconcerting, because of the greater incohesion of the process. It is as revolting to be robbed by a reformer as by a trust. Oppressive taxation, which forced the great Revolution upon France; dishonest "deals," which have made a mockery of justice in the United States; ironic laws, framed for the convenient looting of the bourgeoisie in Russia;—there is as much idealism in one device as in the others. Sonorous phrases like "reconstruction of the world's psychology", and "creation of a new world-atmosphere," are mental sedatives, drug words, calculated to put to sleep any uneasy apprehensions. They may mean
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