of the people on a small scale, and the more
faithfully it reflects their faults as well as their virtues, their
ignorance as well as their intelligence, the more truly representative
it is said to be. It is even asserted that with the modern facilities
for taking a poll, representative government might be dispensed with
and the people allowed to govern themselves. Democracy, we are assured,
means that every man should exercise an equality of political power.
Now, if this conception is correct, we should at once insist that every
law should be submitted to a direct referendum of the people; that
legislators should be mere agents for drawing up laws; and that the
executive should be directly responsible to and elected by the people.
But if representation is not a mere substitute for the direct action of
the people this idea as to the true line of democratic progress falls to
the ground. The whole question, therefore, hinges on what representation
is and what are the principles underlying it.

Looking back to the history of its introduction, we have seen that it
was only in proportion as the deputies of the local communities were not
regarded as delegates or agents that they became representatives.
Professor E. Jenks has written an interesting article in the
_Contemporary Review_ for December, 1898, in which he advances the
theory that representation is a union of the ideas of agency, borrowed
from the Roman law, and of vicarious liability from barbaric sources. As
to the latter he points out that in Anglo-Saxon times the only way for
the King to control the free local communities was to exact hostages
till crimes were punished or fines paid. In England, where these ideas
were combined, constitutional monarchy was firmly established; but in
France, Germany, &c, in whose medieval parliaments the idea of agency
prevailed, and where in consequence the parliamentary idea was weak,
absolute monarchy held its ground. When Edward I. desired for purposes
of his own to emphasize the unlimited liability of political
representatives, and insisted that they should have "full and sufficient
power to do what of common council shall be ordained," he probably never
realized that a body having power to bind the shires and towns was a
formidable institution, or that the trembling hostages would become in
time haughty plenipotentiaries. But whatever may have been the social
conditions which gave rise to the idea, it is certain that it was th