weight of conformism, even ideas in which no one any longer believed could
persist, blocking innovation:
No one combats the doomed belief openly. No forces gather to make war on it. Its
proponents quietly abandon it one by one, until only a minority still clings to it. In
this situation, its reign persists. Since its enemies continue to hold their peace or to
communicate their thoughts only in secret, it is a long time before they can be sure
that a great revolution has taken place, and, being in doubt, they make no move.
They watch and keep silent. The majority no longer believes, but it appears still to
believe, and this hollow ghost of public opinion is enough to chill the blood of
would-be innovators and reduce them to respectful silence. (DA, II.3.xxi)From the combination of conformism and centralization, it was but a small
step to a new despotism, based not on brute coercion but on‘an immense
tutelary power’that is‘absolute, meticulous, regular, provident and mild’(DA,
II.4.vi). Driven by the principle of utility, rather than by respect for independ-
ence, it‘assumes sole responsibility for securing [its citizens’] pleasure and
watching their fate’(DA, II.4.vi). As it matured, democracy could therefore
degenerate, not into mob rule, as its traditional critics feared, but into a
historically unprecedented bureaucratic state that, instead of fostering inde-
pendent, morally alert individuals, transformed its citizens into easily man-
aged sheep.
5.3 Democracy in Australia
That these themes would resonate with Hancock, as he confronted the Aus-
tralia of the late 1920s, is unsurprising. Virtually from the moment of its initial
publication,Democracy in Americahad echoed loudly in the controversies
about the colonies’future. Barely a year after its second volume appeared in
1840, Herman Merivale, then Drummond Professor of Political Economy at
Oxford and, from 1848, the powerful permanent under-secretary of the Colo-
nial Office during the colonies’transition to responsible government, relied
heavily on Tocqueville in hisLectures on Colonization and Colonies(Merivale
2010), which were required reading for the colonies’administrative and pol-
itical elites (Beasley 2005, pp. 20–43). Tocqueville’s concerns about democracy
alsofigured prominently in the rambunctious debate about the New South
Wales Constitution Bill in 1853, in which William Charles Wentworth,
pointing to Tocqueville’s unquestioned authority, emphasized that even an
observer‘so deeply...imbued with democratic prejudices’as Tocqueville was
obliged to concede that American democracy was a‘degrading’tyranny (Clark
2000, pp. 15–17). And the Tocquevillian strains were equally evident in New
South Wales Governor William Thomas Denison, with his keen awareness of
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History