fit for the
exercise of civic responsibility. He welcomes signs of dissatisfaction
among the disfranchised as the best proof of awakening interest in
public affairs, and he has none of those fears of ultimate social
disruption which are a nightmare to bureaucracies because experience has
sufficiently proved to him the healing power of freedom, of
responsibility, and of the sense of justice. Moreover, a democrat cannot
be a democrat for his own country alone. He cannot but recognize the
complex and subtle interactions of nation upon nation which make every
local success or failure of democracy tell upon other countries. Nothing
has been more encouraging to the Liberalism of Western Europe in recent
years than the signs of political awakening in the East. Until yesterday
it seemed as though it would in the end be impossible to resist the
ultimate "destiny" of the white races to be masters of the rest of the
world. The result would have been that, however far democracy might
develop within any Western State, it would always be confronted with a
contrary principle in the relation of that State to dependencies, and
this contradiction, as may easily be seen by the attentive student of
our own political constitutions, is a standing menace to domestic
freedom. The awakening of the Orient, from Constantinople to Pekin, is
the greatest and most hopeful political fact of our time, and it is with
the deepest shame that English Liberals have been compelled to look on
while our Foreign Office has made itself the accomplice in the attempt
to nip Persian freedom in the bud, and that in the interest of the most
ruthless tyranny that has ever crushed the liberties of a white people.

The cause of democracy is bound up with that of internationalism. The
relation is many-sided. It is national pride, resentment, or ambition
one day that sweeps the public mind and diverts it from all interest in
domestic progress. The next day the same function is performed no less
adequately by a scare. The practice of playing on popular emotions has
been reduced to a fine art which neither of the great parties is ashamed
to employ. Military ideals possess the mind, and military expenditure
eats up the public resources. On the other side, the political economic
and social progress of other nations reacts on our own. The backwardness
of our commercial rivals in industrial legislation was long made an
argument against further advances among ourselves. Converse