he growth as well as the
misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this
new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth
century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast
perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a
splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed
in the personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of
the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.

The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes with
it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically
different in their antecedents, their protagonists, their modes of
operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the
creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of
the old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same _milieu_ that was
responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain
of the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and
finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at
the expense of the great mass of their blood-brothers, others of the
same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting in
new schemes, of government, which would take all power away from the
class that had hitherto exercised it and fix it firmly in the hands of
the emancipated proletariat. This new model was called then, and is
called now, democracy. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish between
democracy of theory and democracy of method. Perhaps I should have used
a more lucid nomenclature if I had simply distinguished between
republicanism and democracy, for this is what it amounts to. The former
is as old as man, and is part of the "passion for perfection" that
characterizes all crescent society, and is indeed the chief difference
between brute and human nature; it means the guaranteeing of justice,
and may be described as consisting of abolition of privilege, equality
of opportunity, and utilization of ability. Democracy of method consists
in a variable and uncertain sequence of devices which are supposed to
achieve the democracy of ideal, but as a matter of fact have thus far
usually worked in the opposite direction. The activity of this movement
synchronizes with the pressing upward of the "the masses" through the
dissolving crust of "the classes," and represents their contri