nce the nature and possibilities of
which have been discussed in the preceding chapters of this volume.

Modern Democracy first asserted itself in the ancient kingdoms of
France and Great Britain (counting the former British colonies in
America as a part of the latter), and it is in the French and
English-speaking communities that Democracy has developed itself most
completely. Upon the supposition we have made, Democracy broke out first
in these States because they were leading the way in material progress,
because they were the first States to develop industrialism, wholesale
mechanisms, and great masses of insubordinate activity outside the
recognized political scheme, and the nature and time and violence of the
outbreak was determined by the nature of the superseded government, and
the amount of stress between it and the new elements. But the detachment
of a great section of the new middle-class from the aristocratic order
of England to form the United States of America, and the sudden
rejuvenescence of France by the swift and thorough sloughing of its
outworn aristocratic monarchy, the consequent wars and the Napoleonic
adventure, checked and modified the parallel development that might
otherwise have happened in country after country over all Europe west of
the Carpathians. The monarchies that would probably have collapsed
through internal forces and given place to modern democratic states were
smashed from the outside, and a process of political re-construction,
that has probably missed out the complete formal Democratic phase
altogether--and which has been enormously complicated through
religious, national, and dynastic traditions--set in. Throughout
America, in England, and, after extraordinary experiments, in France,
political democracy has in effect legally established itself--most
completely in the United States--and the reflection and influence of its
methods upon the methods of all the other countries in intellectual
contact with it, have been so considerable as practically to make their
monarchies as new in their kind, almost, as democratic republics. In
Germany, Austria, and Italy, for example, there is a press nearly as
audible as in the more frankly democratic countries, and measurably akin
in influence; there are constitutionally established legislative
assemblies, and there is the same unofficial development of powerful
financial and industrial powers with which the ostensible Government
must make te