.. a grand moral
obligation, which has never been directly denied since the abolition of
slavery" (iv. 51). There is not a word to be said against these
doctrines: but the practical question is one which M. Comte never even
entertains--viz., when, after being properly educated, people are left
to find their places for themselves, do they not spontaneously class
themselves in a manner much more conformable to their unequal or
dissimilar aptitudes, than governments or social institutions are likely
to do it for them? The Sovereignty of the People, again,--that
metaphysical axiom which in France and the rest of the Continent has so
long been the theoretic basis of radical and democratic politics,--he
regards as of a purely negative character, signifying the right of the
people to rid themselves by insurrection of a social order that has
become oppressive; but, when erected into a positive principle of
government, which condemns indefinitely all superiors to "an arbitrary
dependence upon the multitude of their inferiors," he considers it as a
sort of "transportation to peoples of the divine right so much
reproached to kings" (iv. 55, 56). On the doctrine as a metaphysical
dogma or an absolute principle, this criticism is just; but there is
also a Positive doctrine, without any pretension to being absolute,
which claims the direct participation of the governed in their own
government, not as a natural right, but as a means to important ends,
under the conditions and with the limitations which those ends impose.
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