the course of public business and
frequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to the
fact that they have been ignored and enslaved. The implication is that
each man is the best judge of his own interests and of the means to
advance them; or at least that by making himself his own guide he can in
the end gain the requisite insight and thus not only attain his
practical aims, but also some political and intellectual dignity.

[Sidenote: It is representative.]

All just government pursues the general good; the choice between
aristocratic and democratic forms touches only the means to that end.
One arrangement may well be better fitted to one place and time, and
another to another. Everything depends on the existence or non-existence
of available practical eminence. The democratic theory is clearly wrong
if it imagines that eminence is not naturally representative. Eminence
is synthetic and represents what it synthesises. An eminence not
representative would not constitute excellence, but merely extravagance
or notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, or
feeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for many
diffuse constituents reduced to harmony, so that the wise moment is
filled with an activity in which the upshot of the experience concerned
is mirrored and regarded, an activity just to all extant interests and
speaking in their total behalf. But anything approaching such true
excellence is as rare as it is great, and a democratic society,
naturally jealous of greatness, may be excused for not expecting true
greatness and for not even understanding what it is. A government is not
made representative or just by the mechanical expedient of electing its
members by universal suffrage. It becomes representative only by
embodying in its policy, whether by instinct or high intelligence, the
people's conscious and unconscious interests.

[Sidenote: But subject to decay.]

Democratic theory seems to be right, however, about the actual failure
of theocracies, monarchies, and oligarchies to remain representative and
to secure the general good. The true eminence which natural leaders may
have possessed in the beginning usually declines into a conventional and
baseless authority. The guiding powers which came to save and express
humanity fatten in office and end by reversing their function. The
government reverts to the primeval robber; the church stands in the way
of all w