he product of all these varied energies and the
organic forms through which they operate.

Political organization has always been a powerful preoccupation of
mankind, and the earliest records testify to its antiquity. The
regulation of human intercourse, the delimiting of rights and
privileges, protection of life and property, the codifying of laws,
vague, various and conflicting, the making of new laws and the enforcing
of those that have taken organic form; all these and an hundred other
governmental functions, appeal strongly to the mind and touch closely on
personal interests. It is no wonder that the political history of human
society is the most varied, voluminous and popular in its appeal. At the
present moment this problem has, in general, an even more poignant
appeal, and no rival except the industrial problem, for in both cases
systems that, up to ten years ago, were questioned only by a minority
(large in the case of industry, small and obscure in the case of
government) have since completely broken down, and it is probable that a
political system which had existed throughout the greater part of Europe
and the Americas for a century and a half, almost without serious
criticism, has now as many assailants as industrialism itself.

The change is startling from the "Triumphant Democracy" period, a space
of time as clearly defined and as significant in its characteristics as
the "Victorian Era." Before the war, during the war, and throughout the
earlier years of the even more devastating "peace," the system which
followed the ruin of the Renaissance autocracies, the essential elements
in which were an ever-widening suffrage, parliamentary government, and
the universal operation of the quantitative standard of values, was
never questioned or criticised, except in matters of detail. That it was
the most perfect governmental scheme ever devised and that it must
continue forever, was held to be axiomatic, and with few exceptions the
remedy proposed for such faults as could not possibly escape detection
was a still further extension of the democratic principle. Even the war
itself was held to be "a war to make the world safe for democracy." It
is significant that the form in which this saying now frequently appears
is one in which the word "from" is substituted in place of the word
"for." It is useless to blink the fact that there is now a distrust of
parliamentary and representative government which is almost univers