al
and this distrust, which is becoming widespread, reaches from the
Bolshevism of Russia on the one hand, through many intermediate social
and intellectual stages, to the conservative elements in England and the
United States, and the fast-strengthening royalist "bloc" in France.

In many unexpected places there is visible a profound sense that
something is so fundamentally wrong that palliatives are useless and
some drastic reform is necessary, a reform that may almost amount to
revolution. Lord Bryce still believes in democracy in spite of his keen
realizations of its grievous defects, because, as he says, hope is an
inextinguishable quality of the human soul. Mr. Chesterton preaches
democracy in principle while condemning its mechanism and its workings
with his accustomed vigour; the Adamses renounce democracy and all its
works while offering no hint as to what could consistently take its
place with any better chance of success, while the royalists excoriate
it in unmeasured terms and preach an explicit return to monarchy.
Meanwhile international Bolshevism, hating the thing as violently as do
kings in exile, substitutes a crude and venal autocracy, while organized
labour, as a whole, works for the day when a "class-conscious
proletariat" will have taken matters into its own hands and established
a new aristocracy of privilege in which the present working classes will
hold the whip-hand. Meanwhile the more educated element of the general
public withdraws itself more and more from political affairs, going its
own way and making the best of a bad job it thinks itself taught by
experience it cannot mend.

It is useless to deny that government, in the character of its
personnel, the quality of its output, the standard of its service and
the degree of its beneficence has been steadily deteriorating during the
last century and has now reached, in nearly every civilized country, a
deplorably low level. Popular representatives are less and less men of
character and ability; legislation is absurd in quantity, short-sighted,
frivolous, inquisitorial, and in a large measure prompted by selfish
interests; administration is reckless, wasteful and inefficient, while
it is overloaded in numbers, without any particular aptitude on the part
of its members, and in a measure controlled by personal or corporate
interests. The whole system is in bad odour for it is shot through and
through with the greed for money and influence, while