social order? Do we
assume that the democracy will in the main accept these ideas, or if it
rejects them are we willing to acquiesce in its decision as final? And
in the end what do we expect? Will democracy assert itself, will it find
a common purpose and give it concrete shape? Or will it blunder on, the
passive subject of scares and ambitions, frenzies of enthusiasm and
dejection, clay in the hands of those whose profession it is to model it
to their will.

First as to the general principle. Democracy is not founded merely on
the right or the private interest of the individual. This is only one
side of the shield. It is founded equally on the function of the
individual as a member of the community. It founds the common good upon
the common will, in forming which it bids every grown-up, intelligent
person to take a part. No doubt many good things may be achieved for a
people without responsive effort on its own part. It may be endowed with
a good police, with an equitable system of private law, with education,
with personal freedom, with a well-organized industry. It may receive
these blessings at the hands of a foreign ruler, or from an enlightened
bureaucracy or a benevolent monarch. However obtained, they are all very
good things. But the democratic theory is that, so obtained, they lack a
vitalizing element. A people so governed resembles an individual who has
received all the external gifts of fortune, good teachers, healthy
surroundings, a fair breeze to fill his sails, but owes his prosperous
voyage to little or no effort of his own. We do not rate such a man so
high as one who struggles through adversity to a much less eminent
position. What we possess has its intrinsic value, but how we came to
possess it is also an important question. It is so with a society. Good
government is much, but the good will is more, and even the imperfect,
halting, confused utterance of the common will may have in it the
potency of higher things than a perfection of machinery can ever attain.

But this principle makes one very large assumption. It postulates the
existence of a common will. It assumes that the individuals whom it
would enfranchise can enter into the common life and contribute to the
formation of a common decision by a genuine interest in public
transactions. Where and in so far as this assumption definitely fails,
there is no case for democracy. Progress, in such a case, is not wholly
impossible, but it must depe