a despot may educate the people, and to do so really would be the best
apology for his despotism. But any education which aims at making
human beings other than machines, in the long run makes them claim to
have the control of their own actions. The leaders of French
philosophy in the eighteenth century had been educated by the Jesuits.
Even Jesuit education, it seems, was sufficiently real to call forth
the appetite for freedom. Whatever invigorates the faculties, in
however small a measure, creates an increased desire for their more
unimpeded exercise; and a popular education is a failure if it
educates the people for any state but that which it will certainly
induce them to desire, and most probably to demand.

I am far from condemning, in cases of extreme exigency, the assumption
of absolute power in the form of a temporary dictatorship. Free
nations have, in times of old, conferred such power by their own
choice, as a necessary medicine for diseases of the body politic which
could not be got rid of by less violent means. But its acceptance,
even for a time strictly limited, can only be excused, if, like Solon
or Pittacus, the dictator employs the whole power he assumes in
removing the obstacles which debar the nation from the enjoyment of
freedom. A good despotism is an altogether false ideal, which
practically (except as a means to some temporary purpose) becomes the
most senseless and dangerous of chimeras. Evil for evil, a good
despotism, in a country at all advanced in civilization, is more
noxious than a bad one, for it is far more relaxing and enervating to
the thoughts, feelings, and energies of the people. The despotism of
Augustus prepared the Romans for Tiberius. If the whole tone of their
character had not first been prostrated by nearly two generations of
that mild slavery, they would probably have had spirit enough left to
rebel against the more odious one.