ilised man in East and
West. The knowledge that these forms of democratic government have by no
means at all times and in all places proved successful does not check the
movement. As the British Parliament and the British Constitution have in
the past been accepted as a model in countries seeking free political
institutions, so to-day our Parliament and our Constitutional Government
are still quoted with approval and admiration in those lands where these
institutions are yet to be tried.

The rise of democracy, then, is a matter in which Britain is largely
concerned; and this in spite of the fact that in England little respect and
less attention has been paid to the expounders of democracy and their
constructive theories of popular government. The notion that philosophers
are the right persons to manage affairs of state and hold the reins of
Government has always been repugnant to the English people, and, with us,
to call a man "a political theorist" is to contemn him. The English have
not moved towards democracy with any conscious desire for that particular
form of government, and no vision of a perfect State or an ideal
commonwealth has sustained them on the march. Our boast has been that we
are a "practical" people, and so our politics are, as they ever have been,
experimental. Reforms have been accomplished not out of deference to some
moral or political principle, but because the abuse to be remedied had
become intolerable. Dissatisfaction with the Government and the conviction
that only by enfranchisement and the free election of representatives can
Parliament remove the grounds of dissatisfaction, have carried us towards
democracy.

GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE

We have been brought to accept Abraham Lincoln's famous phrase, "Government
of the people, by the people, for the people," as a definition of
democracy; but in that acceptance there is no harking back to the early
democracies of Greece or Rome, so beloved by the French democrats of the
eighteenth century, who, however, knew very little about those ancient
states--or any vain notion of restoring primitive Teutonic democracy.

The sovereign assemblies of Greece--the Ecclesia of Athens, and the Apella
of Sparta--the Comitia Centuriata of Rome, have no more resemblance to
democracy in the twentieth century than the Witenagemot has to the British
Parliament; and the democracy which has arisen in modern times is neither
to be trace