No man is fit enough to exercise absolute power. A despot crushes his subjects to the earth and leaves them nothing they can call their own.
Even a good despot teaches his subjects to mind their own private interests and to leave everything else to the government.
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Absolute government is a government by one single person and he administers according to his own good sense of what can be good and right for his subjects. And history tells us that the good of the subjects has really meant the interests of the ruler himself. He has never cherished the interests of the subjects. If he does, his absolutism disappears.
Moreover, a good king, under a system of hereditary monarchy, is a sheer chance or accident. There is no guarantee that an able, capable and benevolent ruler must always succeed to the throne.
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History tells us that imbeciles and fools have been the rule whereas the statesmen and sage rulers have been the exceptions. “A hereditary ruler,” says Leacock “seems on the face of things as absurd as the hereditary mathematician or hereditary poet laureate.”
Even if it be admitted that absolute Monarchy is a good form of government, we, who are brought up in the twentieth century, do not believe in good government unless it is self-government, for good government is no substitute for self-government.
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“No government which does not rest upon the affections of the people, which does not stimulate among them an interest in public affairs and create an active, intelligent, and alert citizenship, can be called ideal, and, certainly, no government from which the participation of the people in some from is excluded will ever be able to produce such a body of citizens.”
An absolute monarch dare not allow liberty and rights to his subjects. He does not inspire in them a vigorous political vitality, patriotic loyalty and social solidarity. If he does, he invites his own demise as an absolute monarchy. He will adopt all measures to firmly establish his authority and it remains unquestionable.
To adopt measures that help to infuse in his subjects the spirit of awakening and allows them the enjoyment of rights and other freedoms will spell the destruction of his own authority and most probably his own annihilation.