IX

DEMOCRACY


All the talk, all the aspiration and work that is making now towards
this conception of a world securely at peace, under the direction of a
League of Free Nations, has interwoven with it an idea that is often
rather felt than understood, the idea of Democracy. Not only is justice
to prevail between race and race and nation and nation, but also between
man and man; there is to be a universal respect for human life
throughout the earth; the world, in the words of President Wilson, is to
be made "safe for democracy." I would like to subject that word to a
certain scrutiny to see whether the things we are apt to think and
assume about it correspond exactly with the feeling of the word. I would
like to ask what, under modern conditions, does democracy mean, and
whether we have got it now anywhere in the world in its fulness and
completion.

And to begin with I must have a quarrel with the word itself. The
eccentricities of modern education make us dependent for a number of
our primary political terms upon those used by the thinkers of the small
Greek republics of ancient times before those petty states collapsed,
through sheer political ineptitude, before the Macedonians. They thought
in terms of states so small that it was possible to gather all the
citizens together for the purposes of legislation. These states were
scarcely more than what we English might call sovereign urban districts.