ual extension of aristocratic privileges,
through rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on the
people's part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but the
discovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine and
representative. It is compatible with a very complex government, great
empire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably in
England and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and less
democratic institutions. For under democratic governments the people
have not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicions
and jealousies are quieted by assigning to them a voice, perhaps only a
veto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigious
self-created historical engine. Popular votes never established the
family, private property, religious practices, or international
frontiers. Institutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such as
the popular classes could never have produced; but these products of
natural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgent
protest is raised against them. The people's liberty consists not in
their original responsibility for what exists--for they are guiltless of
it--but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolishing any
detail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure,
which, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itself
from time to time to their instinct and mind.

[Sidenote: Ideals and expedients.]

If we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social and
political democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a general
ethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, and
inconsistent, in its radical form, with such institutions as the family
and hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, is
merely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoother
government of certain states at certain junctures. It involves no
special ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether the
general interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhaps
all women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arising
in great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy,
and the questions actually submitted to the people can be only very
large rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders.

We may now add a few reflections about each kind o