toral campaign than as the inheritor
of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionately
desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself
steadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The most
ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, no
longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for
securing in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of action
for the directors of a church almost all of whose members will remain
voting citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals for a
non-representative democracy which were associated with the communist
and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at all
widely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructive
scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by which
the results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenly
distributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the working
classes.

And yet, in the very nations which have most whole-heartedly accepted
representative democracy, politicians and political students seem
puzzled and disappointed by their experience of it. The United States of
America have made in this respect by far the longest and most continuous
experiment. Their constitution has lasted for a century and a quarter,
and, in spite of controversy and even war arising from opposing
interpretations of its details, its principles have been, and still are,
practically unchallenged. But, as far as an English visitor can judge,
no American thinks with satisfaction of the electoral 'machine' whose
power alike in Federal, State, and Municipal politics is still
increasing.

In England not only has our experience of representative democracy been
much shorter than that of America, but our political traditions have
tended to delay the full acceptance of the democratic idea even in the
working of democratic institutions. Yet, allowing for differences of
degree and circumstance, one finds in England among the most loyal
democrats, if they have been brought into close contact with the details
of electoral organisation, something of the same disappointment which
has become more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a good
many parliamentary contests, and have myself been a candidate in a
series of five London municipal elections. In my last election I noticed
that two of my canvassers, when talking