rn urban district was beyond the scope of the Greek
imagination. There were no railways, telegraphs, telephones, books or
newspapers, there was no need for the state to maintain a system of
education, and the affairs of the state were so simple that they could
be discussed and decided by the human voice and open voting in an
assembly of all the citizens. That is what democracy, meant. In Andorra,
or perhaps in Canton Uri, such democracy may still be possible; in any
other modern state it cannot exist. The opposite term to it was
oligarchy, in which a small council of men controlled the affairs of the
state. Oligarchy, narrowed down to one man, became monarchy. If you
wished to be polite to an oligarchy you called it an aristocracy; if you
wished to point out that a monarch was rather by way of being
self-appointed, you called him a Tyrant. An oligarchy with a property
qualification was a plutocracy.

Now the modern intelligence, being under a sort of magic slavery to the
ancient Greeks, has to adapt all these terms to the problems of states
so vast and complex that they have the same relation to the Greek states
that the anatomy of a man has to the anatomy of a jellyfish. They are
not only greater in extent and denser in population, but they are
increasingly innervated by more and more rapid means of communication
and excitement. In the classical past--except for such special cases as
the feeding of Rome with Egyptian corn--trade was a traffic in luxuries
or slaves, war a small specialized affair of infantry and horsemen in
search of slaves and loot, and empire the exaction of tribute. The
modern state must conduct its enormous businesses through a system of
ministries; its vital interests go all round the earth; nothing that any
ancient Greek would have recognized as democracy is conceivable in a
great modern state. It is absolutely necessary, if we are to get things
clear in our minds about what democracy really means in relation to
modern politics, first to make a quite fresh classification in order to
find what items there really are to consider, and then to inquire which
seem to correspond more or less closely in spirit with our ideas about
ancient democracy.

Now there are two primary classes of idea about government in the
modern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity of
the common man. We may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideas
and wishes about the state and the world, or we ma