PREFACE THE object of this book is to sketch, from the workaday experience of the politician in an advanced Democracy, the popular ideas and impulses which actuate the man in the street, and, emanating from him, control the community; and also to portray the social and industrial conditions which in our time mark democratic communities, and which mingle with and influence so potently their political life. There are already many able and comprehensive works which deal with democratic governments and social systems from outside observation of what they do, and of the tendencies which they display. The purpose of this volume is to give the results of experience and observation from within. There are no personal sketches in these pages.1 While the episodes, political or social, are taken from English-speaking communities, they are not confined to any one State or people. The Province of Excelsior referred to in the book is only used as a Stage upon which to represent various phases of democratic 1 Perhaps William Brereton and Walter Crane should be mentioned as partial exceptions to this statement. They have some resemblance to two old friends of mine. political action and social life as they appear in different lands. To do this the 'unities' are disregarded, and things that might have happened in an American State are dealt with as taking place in a Colonial Dependency of England. But all that is related is true to the Democracy of our time and the social conditions that it induces, the essential features of which are the same in all Anglo-Saxon peoples; though some phases, as, for example, special manifestations of the power of wealth, must be sought for in the United States. Hence the characters of Dorland and Jortin, sketched in these pages, are taken by the writer from American types. Much that is in this book deals with certain weak points that the Democracy of our age is developing. It must not be supposed, because the writer points attention to these, that he condemns Democracy. Like all forms of government which have preceded it and which will follow it, it is in many respects imperfect. But self-government by peoples is obviously the condition decreed by Providence for Western civilisation in its present stage of progress. That fact alone entitles it to respect. And the great hope with regard to it is that, taught by experience, and as the result of the general intelligence of the people, enlightened by free discussion, it will rise superior to defects that now mark it, and to dangers that threaten it. But it can only do this if there is free discussion of its methods of government, and honest, truthful representation of what may be amiss in those methods. Among the many persons sketched in these pages there will be found neither great heroes nor great villains. The only excuse that the writer can offer for the absence of characters so useful to the dramatic force of a story is that he has not, in fact, found either heroes or villains in his everyday experience of democratic institutions. And he has sought throughout to be, above all things, a truthful chronicler of what he has observed. |