t while Free Trade
laid the foundations of prosperity it did not erect the building. He has
to acknowledge that it has not solved the problems of unemployment, of
underpayment, of overcrowding. He has to look deeper into the meaning of
liberty and to take account of the bearing of actual conditions on the
meaning of equality. As an apostle of peace and an opponent of swollen
armaments, he has come to recognize that the expenditure of the social
surplus upon the instruments of progress is the real alternative to its
expenditure on the instruments of war. As a Temperance man he is coming
to rely more on the indirect effect of social improvement on the one
hand and the elimination of monopolist profit on the other, than on the
uncertain chances of absolute prohibition.

There are, then, among the composite forces which maintained the Liberal
Government in power through the crisis of 1910, the elements of such an
organic view as may inspire and direct a genuine social progress.
Liberalism has passed through its Slough of Despond, and in the give and
take of ideas with Socialism has learnt, and taught, more than one
lesson. The result is a broader and deeper movement in which the cooler
and clearer minds recognize below the differences of party names and in
spite of certain real cross-currents a genuine unity of purpose. What
are the prospects of this movement? Will it be maintained? Is it the
steady stream to which we have compared it, or a wave which must
gradually sink into the trough?

To put this question is to ask in effect whether democracy is in
substance as well as in form a possible mode of government. To answer
this question we must ask what democracy really means, and why it is the
necessary basis of the Liberal idea. The question has already been
raised incidentally, and we have seen reason to dismiss both the
individualist and the Benthamite argument for popular government as
unsatisfactory. We even admitted a doubt whether some of the concrete
essentials of liberty and social justice might not, under certain
conditions, be less fully realized under a widely-extended suffrage than
under the rule of a superior class or a well-ordered despotism. On what,
then, it may be asked, do we found our conception of democracy? Is it on
general principles of social philosophy, or on the special conditions of
our own country or of contemporary civilization? And how does our
conception relate itself to our other ideas of the