for this?  Mainly, it would seem, the enormous powers given to the modern organised State by the discoveries of mechanical science and the triumphs of the engineer.  Telegraphy now flashes to the capital the news of a threatening revolt in the hundredth part of the time formerly taken by couriers with their relays of horses.  Fully as great is the saving of time in the transport of large bodies of troops to the disaffected districts.  Thus, the all-important factors that make for success—­force, skill, and time—­are all on the side of the central Governments[64].

[Footnote 64:  See Turkey in Europe, by “Odysseus” (p. 130), for the parallel instance of the enhanced power of the Sultan Abdul Hamid owing to the same causes.]

The spread of constitutional rule has also helped to dispel discontent—­or, at least, has altered its character.  Representative government has tended to withdraw disaffection from the market-place, the purlieus of the poor, and the fastnesses of the forest, and to focus it noisily but peacefully in the columns of the Press and the arena of Parliament.  The appeal now is not so much to arms as to argument; and in this new sphere a minority, provided that it is well organised and persistent, may generally hope to attain its ends.  Revolt, even if it take the form of a refusal to pay taxes, is therefore an anachronism under a democracy; unless, as in the case of the American Civil War, two great sections of the country are irreconcilably opposed.

The fact, however, that there has been no widespread revolt in Russia since the year 1863, shows that democracy has not been the chief influence tending to dissolve or suppress discontent.  As we shall see in a later chapter, Russia has defied constitutionalism and ground down alien races and creeds; yet (up to the year 1904) no great rising has shaken her autocratic system to its base.  This seems to prove that the immunity of the present age in regard to insurrections is due rather to the triumphs of mechanical science than to the progress of democracy.  The fact is not pleasing to contemplate; but it must be faced.  So also must its natural corollary:  that the minority, if rendered desperate, may be driven to arm itself with new and terrible engines of destruction in order to shatter that superiority of force with which science has endowed the centralised Governments of to-day.

Certain it is that desperation, perhaps brought about by a sense of helplessness in face of an armed nation, was one of the characteristics of the Paris Commune, as it was also of Nihilism in Russia.  In fact the Communist effort of 1871 may be termed a belated attempt on the part of a daring minority to dominate France by seizing the machinery of government at Paris.  The success of the Extremists of 1793 and 1848 in similar experiments—­not to speak of the Communistic rising of Babeuf in 1797—­was only temporary; but doubtless it encouraged the “Reds” of 1871 to make their mad bid for power.  Now,