and paralyzed. In the matter of form the inherent difficulty of democratic government, whether direct or representative, is that it is government by majority, not government by universal consent. Its decisions are those of the larger part of the people, not of the whole. This defect is an unavoidable consequence of the necessities of decision and the impossibility of securing universal agreement. Statesmen have sought to remedy it by applying something of the nature of a brake upon the process of change. They have felt that to justify a new departure of any magnitude there must be something more than a bare majority. There must either be a large majority, two-thirds or three-fourths of the electorate, or there must be some friction to be overcome which will serve to test the depth and force as well as the numerical extent of the feeling behind the new proposal. In the United Kingdom we have one official brake, the House of Lords, and several unofficial ones, the civil service, the permanent determined opposition of the Bench to democratic measures, the Press, and all that we call Society. All these brakes act in one way only. There is no brake upon reaction—a lack which
