It is true that the representative governments of Western Europe and America – constitutional monarchies as well as republics – have uprooted some of the external abuses practiced by the representatives of power, and have made it impossible that the holders of power should be such monsters as were the different Louis, Charleses, Henrys, and Johns.  (Although in representative government not only is it possible that power will be seized by cunning, immoral, and artful mediocrities, such as various prime ministers and presidents have been, but the construction of those governments is such that only that kind of people can obtain power.)  It is true that representative governments have abolished such abuses as the lettres de cachet, have removed restrictions on the press, have stopped religious persecutions and oppressions, have submitted the taxation of the people to discussion by their representatives, have made the actions of the government public and subject to criticism, and have facilitated the rapid development in those countries of all sorts of technical improvements giving great comfort to the lives of rich citizens and great military power to the state.  Thus, the nations that have representative government have doubtless become more powerful industrially, commercially, and in military matters than despotically governed nations, and the lives of their leisured classes have certainly become more secure, comfortable, agreeable, and aesthetic than they used to be.  But is the life of most of the people in those countries more secure, freer, or, above all, more reasonable and moral?

I think not.

Under the despotic power of one man, the number of persons who come under the corrupting influence of power and live on the labor of others is limited, and consists of the despot’s close friends, assistants, servants, and flatterers, and of their helpers.  The infection of depravity is focused in the court of the despot, whence it radiates in all directions.

Where power is limited, i.e. where many persons take part in it, the number of centers of infection is augmented, for everyone who shares power has his friends, helpers, servants, flatterers, and relations.  Where there is universal suffrage, these centers of infection are still more diffused.  Every voter becomes the object of flattery and bribery.  The character of the power itself is also changed.  Instead of power founded on direct violence, we get a monetary power, also founded on violence, not directly, but through a complicated transmission.

Thus, under representative governments, instead of one or a few centers of depravity, we get a large number of such centers.  There springs up a large class of people living idly on others’ labor, the class called the “bourgeois” – people who, being protected by violence, arrange for themselves easy and comfortable lives, free from hard work.

When arranging an easy and pleasant life, not only for a monarch and his court, but also for thousands of little kinglets, many things are needed to embellish and to amuse this idle life.  It results that inventions appear whenever power passes from a despotic to a representative government, which facilitate the supply of objects that add to the pleasure and safety of the lives of the wealthy classes.

To produce all these objects, an ever-increasing number of workingmen are drawn away from agriculture, and have their capacities directed to the production of pleasing trifles used by the rich, or even to some extent by the workers themselves.  There springs up a class of town workers so situated as to be in complete dependence on the wealthy classes.  The number of these people grows and grows the longer the power of representative government endures, and their condition becomes worse and worse.  In the United States, out of a population of seventy million, ten million are proletarians, and the relation between the well-to-do and the proletariat classes is the same in England, Belgium and France.  The number of men exchanging the labor of producing objects of primary necessity for the labor of producing objects of luxury is ever increasing in those countries.  It clearly follows that the result of such a trend of affairs must be the ever greater overburdening of that diminishing number which has to support the luxurious lives of the ever increasing number of idle people.  Evidently, such a way of life cannot continue.

What is happening is as though there were a man whose body went on increasing in weight while the legs that supported it grew continually thinner and weaker.  When the support eventually vanished, the body would have to fall.