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"When democracy turns, as it often does, into a corrupt plutocracy, both national decadence and social revolution are being prepared." So wrote the Irish-born historian, W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903) in this devastating assault on mass democracy.

Lecky spoke for the landed gentry and the upper middle classes of late Victorian England when he warned his countrymen that an unfettered democracy would destroy the balance of interests in the community and thereby undermine the Constitution.

"A tendency to democracy," said Lecky, "does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency toward greater liberty." Indeed, the type of democracy emerging in Britain seemed to be the rudiment of socialism.

"The most remarkable political characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth century has unquestionably been the complete displacement of the centre of power in free governments, and the accompanying changes in the prevailing theories about the principles on which representative government should be based. It has extended over a great part of the civilised world, and, although it has had all the effects of a profound and far-reaching revolution, it has, in some of the most conspicuous instances, been effected without any act of violence or any change in the external framework of government. I have attempted in another work to describe at length the guiding principles on which the English parliamentary government of the eighteenth century was mainly based, and which found their best expression and defence in the writings of Burke. It was then almost universally held that the right of voting was not a natural right, but a right conferred by legislation on grounds of expediency, or, in other words, for the benefit of the State."

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903), an Anglo-Irish historian and essayist of classic Whig proclivities, was perhaps the greatest historical scholar Ireland ever produced.

Lecky was a Whig in the tradition of Edmund Burke, who remained his lifelong intellectual hero. Always suspicious of democracy, he deplored the evils of excess in religion or nationalism; at the same time he was acutely and somewhat pessimistically aware of the importance of mass social influences and ideas in history. Like his contemporary John Richard Green, he helped to reorient the purposes of 19th-century historical writing away from politics and diplomatics.