Little as this truth is recognized and practiced, it lurks in the current political discussions. If it is not openly proclaimed, it is tacitly implied. Mr. Godkin defines democracy as "the participation of the whole community in the work of government."[1]
Bringing out more distinctly the idea that it is something besides the universal possession of political power, Sir Thomas Erskine May defines it as "a principle or force, and not simply an institution."[2] More specific still, Mr. Lowell describes it as a "form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man had a chance and knew that he had it."[3] Mr. Morley also holds that it means something more than political sovereignty put into the hands of everybody. Showing that as such it has shattered the old forms of despotism and enlarged the opportunities of life for all, high and low, rich and poor, he says: "It has shaken the strength and altered the attitude of churches, has affected the old subjection of women and modified the old conceptions of the family and of property, has exalted labor, has created and dominated the huge enginery of the press, has penetrated in a thousand subtle ways into the whole region of rights, duties, human relations, and social opportunities."[4] It is Boudrillart, however, that brings out the truth that democracy, properly speaking, is a form of moral control as well as a condition of freedom. After saying that modern democracy "permits a larger and larger number to enjoy the moral, intellectual, and material possessions of life," and "undertakes to substitute merit for favor and right for injustice," he adds: "It takes shelter behind the doctrine of perfectibility, which applies not only to the achievements of the human mind, to the discoveries of science, to the inventions of industry, but to the social condition and to the political and economic conditions that favor it. . . . To let each man be more and more a man," he continues, emphasizing the need of moral control to check the possible license of freedom "that is to say, realize more perfectly the type of humanity, by the development of all that constitutes it—such is the end to which democracy aspires. Development of power for the individual and for the race—that is its ideal."[5]
II.
Finding little cheer in the contemplation of the ideal toward which the evanescence of political control and the growth of moral control have been taking the human race, the students of democracy are often weighted heavily with foreboding. It seems to portend some disaster that no man can avert. "There is no
