Excerpt from Joseph Mazzini, an Essay Read at the April 1909 Meeting of the Chit Chat Club of San Francisco

At the opening of the nineteenth century, the Common Man, having fought his way up through the ascending stages of slave, serf, and hireling, had reached the very threshold of freedom, when, suddenly, in the glare of the red lights of the French Revolution, old man Autocracy and old woman Papacy, both galvanized into a semblance of new life, re-entered, led by Prince Metternich, the chief executioner and spy of the associated villanies. Lights extinguished. A slow and sad chorus sings, "Man shall not live by Rights alone." Curtain.

A group of philosophers, some leaving, some assembling, comment on the progress of the plot. J. Bentham, "the most philanthropic of the philanthropic, " gathers up his notes on "the greatest happiness of the greatest number, " and stamps out, leaving a cure for every evil except his own philosophy. Henry Maine echoes: "Is not the happiness of one Brahmin worth at least the happiness of twenty ordinary men?" Every government is a standing conspiracy to rob and bamboozle, cries Cobden, "the bagman with a cheap calico millennium." "The terrors of the majority, " "the evils of collective mediocrity, " "government by roughs, clowns, and the common herd, " growls John Stuart Mill, the "aristocrat of democracy, " and adds: "To serve the State, beard the crowd, " "Democracy is a temple of rotten bricks."

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