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world is redeemed from the darkness of despotism. The speck of white has become the controlling color.

The political sky has cleared, as when the rising sun pours through a rift in the clouded morning and the patch of blue grows into a beaming day.

Yet we must not forget that much of the world is still in the dark, and that the light is not pure white in any land. No country has yet perfected popular government. Manhood suffrage is very democratic compared with the past, but is only an aristocracy of men compared with the full ideal. Government by half the people of age and discretion is not government by the people. Government by office-holders is not even government by half the people. If candidates are selected by party "bosses" and "machines," and elected by minorities; if the local affairs of a city are controlled by the electors of other cities and towns; if representation is not fairly apportioned, and laws are made by final vote of elected delegates, who may pass measures the people do not want, and refuse to pass measures the people do want—we have no complete democracy, but a mess of aristocracies. He is sovereign whose will is in control. So far as the elected persons serve their private interests, or the interests of their corporate over-lords, and defy the people till their terms expire, to that extent we lack democracy and submit to an elective aristocracy. Democracy means something more than the periodic election of a new set of masters. Democracy in perfect and reliable form demands not only equal suffrage but municipal home rule, direct nominations, proportional representation, preferential voting, and direct legislation. Equal suffrage on moderate conditions, with education well diffused, direct nominations, and direct legislation, guaranteed in the Constitution along with the secret ballot, would place the effective power in the hands of the mass of people, enabling them to adopt and enforce all other needful measures at their will. A country with these basic institutions might therefore be regarded as a true democracy in reference even to the final standard, but no country has as yet combined these fundamental

elements. Parts of America have equal suffrage, and other parts have full use of direct legislation, but no State has both; and both are essential to anything like a complete and trustworthy establishment of government by the people. Switzerland has direct legislation, but not equal suffrage. New Zealand has equal suffrage and direct nominations, but very inadequate means of direct legislation; and, though her representatives now appear to carry out the popular will, the representative system cannot be relied on as the expression of popular sovereignty unless guarded and controlled by the check of the referendum and the spur of the initiative.

Another principle of vital moment must be noted here. The true democracy demands for others the rights it claims for itself. This spirit has already shown decided strength, and no doubt will manifest increasing vigor in the future. The democrats of France declared their intent to carry liberty to other nations. In England the wide extension of the suffrage was not due in the main to any agitation or effective demand among the disfranchised masses, but to the growing sense of justice and true public policy on the part of the ruling classes. The liberty-lovers of America demanded civic equality for the blacks, and put it in the Constitution by an overwhelming vote. They now demand full suffrage for women on the same essential terms as for men. Sympathy with the Cubans in their struggle for independence was a leading factor in the hearty support the people gave the recent war with Spain; and though sad blunders have been made, and party allegiance has dragged the people for a moment from full adherence to the principles on which our government is based, yet the heart of America is true to liberty, and will compel the government to accord self-government to the Filipinos, as well as to the Cubans, by the same all-moving moral force and sense of right that make Great Britain give substantial liberty to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, except in moments of misunderstanding and industrial aggression.

The altruistic element of democracy is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the political development of our

time. Modern democracy is civilized, not merely because it pertains to civilized societies and is able to grapple with the problems and conditions of complex and highly evolved communities, but because in growing recognition of the fundamental postulate of democracy that the world and all the opportunities of life belong to humanity, it claims for others the rights it demands for itself-not perfectly as yet (for the civic conscience is not fully developed, nor the fact fully recognized that the liberty of one involves the liberty of all), but with such vigor of liberal feeling that this fine spirit of uplifting, all-enfolding freedom so strongly manifested by French and Anglo-Saxon republics affords one of the most striking contrasts between the modern democracies and the pseudodemocracies of former times. The "free cities" of Germany and Italy were set in the midst of feudal estates, small clearings in a wilderness of servitude, and only partly free themselves-mere fly-specks on the globe, with a needle-point of light in each. Their freedom meant release from feudal burdens, but not from the rule of a privileged class; and the burgher aristocracy made no effort to lift the workers to equality with themselves, and the workers in the cities though struggling for their own advancement did not strive to liberate their brothers in the agricultural districts. Every class devoted itself to maintaining or securing its own supremacy and was ready to use whatever power it might obtain, not to liberate but to dominate other classes. The stronger cities made war on the weaker ones, and reduced them to subjection. Florence conquered and held as subjects half a dozen sister "republics." The democratic aristocracies of former times were like the trusts of to-day-limited combinations, internally coöperative but externally aristocratic and aggressive. The great democracies and continental republics of our time, including every class and interest from the city to the forest and the farm in one political coöperation under the control of the whole body of the people, disclose the unexampled progress of free institutions in the nineteenth century, and with enormous emphasis

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