Note (return) — Chapter II
Reading edition
The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore one that would exist at least equally in Plato's corporate despotism as in the most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay on The First Principles of Government, says: 'It is ... on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and the most popular.'[68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat then becomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, or religious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic State.