d for its origin to Greece or Rome, nor found to be evolved from
Anglo-Saxon times. The early democracies of Athens and Sparta were confined
to small states, and were based on a slave population without civic rights.
There was not even a conception that slaves might or should take part in
politics, and the slaves vastly outnumbered the citizens. Modern democracy
does not tolerate slavery, it will not admit the permanent exclusion of any
body of people from enfranchisement; though it finds it hard to ignore
differences of race and colour, it is always enlarging the borders of
citizenship. So that already in the Australian Commonwealth, in New
Zealand, in certain of the American States, in Norway, and in Finland, we
have the complete enfranchisement of all men and women who are of age to
vote.

Apart from this vital difference between a slave-holding democracy and a
democracy of free citizens--a difference that rent the United States in
civil war, and was only settled in America by democracy ending
slavery--ancient democracy was government by popular assembly, and modern
democracy is government through elected representatives. The former is only
possible in small communities with very limited responsibilities--a parish
meeting can decide questions of no more than strictly local interest; for
our huge empires of to-day nothing better than representative government
has been devised for carrying out the general will of the majority.

As for the early English Witenagemot, it was simply an assembly of the
chiefs, and, though crowds sometimes attended, all but the great men were
the merest spectators. Doubtless the folk-moot of the tribe was democratic,
for all free men attended it, and the English were a nation of freeholders,
and the slaves were few--except in the west--and might become free men.[1]
The shire-moot, too, with its delegates from the hundred-moots, was equally
democratic. But with feudalism and the welding of the nation, tribal
democracies passed away, leaving, however, in many places a valuable
tradition of local self-government.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY

A steady and invincible belief that those who maintain the defence of the
country and pay for the cost of government should have a voice in the great
council of the nation, and the conviction that effective utterance can be
found for that voice in duly chosen representatives, are the foundations on
which democracy has built. Democracy itself comes in (1