l needs and the status of particular
governments. It is certainly no fundamental question of the social
order. Those who make socialism a supreme and universal principle also
appear to be too radical. Sellars says that socialism is a democratic
movement, the purpose of which is to secure an economic organization
of society that will give a maximum of justice, liberty and
efficiency. Drake, in "Democracy Made Safe," says that socialism
implies equality everywhere; more than that, it means social,
political, economic and legal equality throughout the earth. One
cannot but feel that these enthusiastic writers are making the mistake
of undertaking to do by political mutation, so to speak, that which
can be accomplished, we may suppose, only by a slow process of
experimentation in government, and the still slower but more certain
method of education, in which all people are trained in fundamental
social relations. Radical and venturesome change in so great and
complex an organism as a great nation is now dangerous, because only a
part of the conditions can be taken into account, and the result,
therefore, must be conjectural.

Radical socialism that threatens to throw political power into the
hands of a political class, or of any social or economic class,
bolshevism which Dillon (speaking of Russia especially) says is doomed
to failure because of its sheer economic impossibility, any plan which
tends to concentrate authority in any class is threatening to our
future. The democratic spirit must hold fast against the rising tide
from the lower classes, just as it has been obliged to contend against
autocracy. Democracy has on one side to assimilate aristocracy, and
not overturn it. So it resists the rise of the proletariat, not to
turn this force back, even if this were possible, but to control it.
It is precisely because of the deep movement of the people--the world
revelation and the world revolution, as Weyl calls it--that we must
make all political institutions flexible and adjustible, and also
throw into the balance all the powers of education and thus save
democracy from itself.

These dangers to democracy are not to be taken too lightly. Democracy
indeed faces two dangers. Hobson in "Democracy After the War" has
stated one of them. He says that the war will result in no easy
victory for democracy, for the system of caste and bureaucracy is very
likely to become fixed. Democracy therefore must be worked for, and to
th