s to
Parliament--and four Maori M.P.'s are returned.

TYRANNY UNDER DEMOCRATIC FORMS

Experience has proved that democratic and republican forms of government
are no guarantee that the nation possesses political liberty.

Mexico, nominally a republic under President Diaz, was in reality a
military autocracy of the severest kind. The South American Republics are
merely unstable monarchies, at the mercy of men who can manipulate the
political machinery and get control of the army.

It is too early yet to decide whether the constitutional form of government
set up in Turkey in 1908, or the republic created on the abolition of
monarchy in Portugal in 1910, mark national movements to democracy. In
neither country is there evidence that general political freedom has been
the goal of the successful revolutionist, or that the people have obtained
any considerable measure of political power or civil liberty. Ambitious and
unscrupulous men can make full use of republican and democratic forms to
gain political mastery over their less cunning fellows, and no machinery of
government has ever yet been devised that will safeguard the weak and the
foolish from the authority of the strong and the capable.

Those who put their trust in theories of popular sovereignty, and urge the
referendum and initiative as the surer instruments of democracy than
Parliamentary representation, may recall that a popular plebiscite
organised by Napoleon in 1802 conferred on him the Consulate for life; that
Louis Napoleon was made President of the French Republic in 1848 by a
popular vote, obtained a new constitution by a plebiscite in 1851, and a
year later arranged another plebiscite which declared him hereditary
Emperor, Napoleon III. France, where naturally Rousseau's theories have
made the deepest impression, has since the Revolution gloried in the right
of the "sovereign people" to overthrow the government, and its elected
representatives have been alternately at the mercy of dictators and social
revolutionists.

On the whole, the stability of the British Government, rooted in the main
on the traditional belief in the representation of the electorate, would
seem to make more surely for national progress and wider political liberty
than the alternation of revolution and reaction which France has known in
the last hundred and twenty years.

England has not been without its popular outbursts against what the
American poet called "the never-ending