ABSTRACT
It is, truly, a deep and illuminating observation on the conditions which are favorable to a healthy and progressive evolution of democracy and on the conditions which make it morbid and degenerative. In America, though it had its early disciples, notably Tom Paine, not until the era of the Founding Fathers was over, not until the era of Andrew Jackson, did the Jacobin doctrine become the popular political creed of the American democracy. The Jacobin doctrine is addressed to the revolutionary collision between the inviolable governing caste and the excluded men claiming the redress of their grievances and their place in the sun. In America and in most of the newer liberal democracies of the Western world, the Jacobin heresy is, though not unchallenged and not universal, the popular and dominant theory in the schools. The Jacobins and their successors made a political religion founded upon the reversal of civility.
