f the worst faults of democracy, without its advantages. As Mr. Graham
Wallas says: 'When a Tsar or a bureaucracy finds itself forced to govern
in opposition to a vague national feeling which may at any moment create
an overwhelming national purpose, the autocrat becomes the most
unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial or religious or social
hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less scruple than a newspaper
proprietor under a democracy,' The autocrat, in fact, is often a slave,
as the demagogue is often a tyrant. Lastly, the democrat may urge that
one of the commonest accusations against democracy--that the populace
chooses its rulers badly--is not true in times of great national danger.
On the contrary, it often shows a sound instinct in finding the
strongest man to carry it through a crisis. At such times the parrots
and monkeys are discarded, and a Napoleon or a Kitchener is given a
free hand, though he may have despised all the demagogic arts. In other
words, a democracy sometimes knows when to abdicate. The excesses of
revolutionists are not an argument against democracy, since revolutions
are anything rather than democratic.

Nevertheless, the indictment against democracy is a very heavy one, and
it is worth while to state the main items in the charge.

1. Whatever may be truly said about the good sense of a democracy during
a great crisis, at ordinary times it does not bring the best men to the
top. Professor Hearnshaw, in his admirable 'Democracy at the
Crossroads,' collects a number of weighty opinions confirming this
judgment. Carlyle, who proclaimed the merits of silence in some thirty
volumes, blames democracy for ignoring the 'noble, silent men' who could
serve it best, and placing power in the hands of windbags. Ruskin,
Matthew Arnold, Sir James Stephen, Sir Henry Maine, and Lecky, all agree
that 'the people have for the most part neither the will nor the power
to find out the best men to lead them.' In France the denunciations of
democratic politicians are so general that it would be tedious to
enumerate the writers who have uttered them. One example will suffice;
the words are the words of Anatole Beaulieu in 1885:

The wider the circle from which politicians and
state-functionaries are recruited, the lower seems their
intellectual level to have sunk. This deterioration in the
personnel of government has been yet more striking from the
moral point of view. Politics