Key ideas: In Democracy and Liberty, published in 1899, Lecky examines how the growing tendency towards mass democracy might undermine individual liberty.
Equality is the idol of democracy but, with the infinitely various capacities and energies of men, this can only be attained by a constant, systematic, stringent repression of their natural development. Whenever natural forces have unstricted play, inequality is certain forces to have ensue...
In the Middle Ages, the two most democratic institutions were the Church and the guild.
The first taught the essential spiritual equality of mankind, and placed men taken from the servile class on a pedestal before which kings and nobles were compelled to bow but it formed the most tremendous instrument of spiritual tyranny the world has ever seen.
The second organised industry on a self-governing and representative basis, but at the same time restricted and regulated it in all its details with the most stringent despotism.
In our own day, no fact is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation. [...] The great majority of the democracies of the world are now frankly protectionist, and even in free-trade countries the multiplication of laws regulating, restricting, and interfering with industry in all its departments is one of the most marked characteristics of our time.
There are other ways in which democracy does not harmonise well with liberty.
To place the chief power in the most ignorant classes is to place it in the hands of those who naturally care least for political liberty, and who are most likely to follow with an absolute devotion some strong leader....
It would be a great mistake to suppose that the French despotic Empire after 1852 rested on bayonets alone. It rested partly on the genuine consent of those large agricultural classes who cared greatly for material prosperity and very little for constitutional liberty, and partly on the panic produced among the middle classes by the socialist preaching of 1848.
Education, even to a very humble degree, does much to enlarge interests and brighten existence ; but, by a melancholy compensation, it makes men far more impatient of the tedium, the monotony, and the contrasts It produces desires which it cannot always sate, and it affects very considerably the disposition and relations of classes. [...]
Education nearly always promotes peaceful tastes and orderly habits in the community, but in other respects its political value is often greatly overrated. The more dangerous forms of animosity and dissension are usually undiminished, and are often stimulated, by its influence.
An immense proportion of those who have learnt to read, never read anything but a party newspaper — very probably a newspaper specially intended to inflame or to mislead them — and the half-educated mind is peculiarly open to political Utopias and fanaticisms.
Very few such men can realise distant consequences, or even consequences which are distant but one remove from the primary or direct one. [...]
The complete illiteracy of a man is a strong argument against entrusting him with political power, but the mere knowledge of reading and writing is no real guarantee, or even presumption, that he will wisely exercise it.