simply places power in the hands
of the most skilful electioneers; that neither men nor their rights are
identically equal, but vary with every individual, and, above all, that
the minimum or maximum of general happiness is related only so
indirectly to the public control that people will suffer great miseries
from their governments unresistingly, and, on the other hand, change
their rulers on account of the most trivial irritations. The case
against all the prolusions of ostensible Democracy is indeed so strong
that it is impossible to consider the present wide establishment of
Democratic institutions as being the outcome of any process of
intellectual conviction; it arouses suspicion even whether ostensible
Democracy may not be a mere rhetorical garment for essentially
different facts, and upon that suspicion we will now inquire.

Democracy of the modern type, manhood suffrage and so forth, became a
conspicuous phenomenon in the world only in the closing decades of the
eighteenth century. Its genesis is so intimately connected with the
first expansion of the productive element in the State, through
mechanism and a co-operative organization, as to point at once to a
causative connection. The more closely one looks into the social and
political life of the eighteenth century the more plausible becomes this
view. New and potentially influential social factors had begun to
appear--the organizing manufacturer, the intelligent worker, the skilled
tenant, and the urban abyss, and the traditions of the old land-owning
non-progressive aristocratic monarchy that prevailed in Christendom,
rendered it incapable--without some destructive shock or convulsion--of
any re-organization to incorporate or control these new factors. In the
case of the British Empire an additional stress was created by the
incapacity of the formal government to assimilate the developing
civilization of the American colonies. Everywhere there were new
elements, not as yet clearly analyzed or defined, arising as mechanism
arose; everywhere the old traditional government and social system,
defined and analyzed all too well, appeared increasingly obstructive,
irrational, and feeble in its attempts to include and direct these new
powers. But now comes a point to which I am inclined to attach very
great importance. The new powers were as yet shapeless. It was not the
conflict of a new organization with the old. It was the preliminary
dwarfing and deliquescence