September Massacres and the Mytilenean Judgment are possible. We are concerned here with the nature, not with the justification of Democracy. And we contend that a democracy is not a people left alone as much as possible, but a people acting together as much as possible; not enjoying common immunity, but achieving a common destiny. A free state is a state in which the conditions of free individual conduct are as far as possible guaranteed. But a democratic state is a state in which the inhabitants themselves actively and continually mould the conditions of their life as it proceeds -is, in fine, a politocracy, the ultimately sovereign synod being composed of individually active and independent citizens.

Further, the dynamic force in democracy will depend upon the scope which civic reciprocity-the reaction of citizen on citizen-is afforded by the organisation of the people.

Democracy is principally concerned with the creation, not with the representation of opinion. Vigorous opinion in a real democracy will soon indicate itself in the atmosphere of national life, and the Statute Book will not lag far behind the complex of national feeling.

Now here is the crux of the matter. "Representative" democracy may secure civil liberty. It is impossible to suppose that it will provide that scope for citizenship (which is an active part in the evolution of national life) which a politocracy must afford. It is to democracy of the parliamentary type to which Maine refers when he declares that "one of the strangest of vulgar ideas is that a very wide suffrage could or

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would promote progress, new ideas, new discoveries, new inventions, new arts of life. The chances are that it will produce a mischievous form of Conservatism."

Of course he is right: exactly right. But he is not attacking Democracy, but Representative Governmentthat political arrangement which, while permitting a veto to the inhabitants, yet affords them immediately, constantly, and locally no means of creating the circumstances of civic life. The state which Maine assails is Responsible Aristocracy, no more.

Let me recur to that word "locally". For therein lies our key.

The ordinary type of political society to-day is the Nation-state. But it should never be forgotten that the men who created the Nation or Country-state were not Democrats. The debris of the politocratic apparatus which had preceded the Nation-state remained indeed in the new political unit-remained in the local selfgoverning institutions of the shire. But, remarkably and unfortunately enough, while these local institutions were revived, utilised, and finally warped out of recognition by the Monarchy, that same creative force which had established the new Nation-group on a basis of military allegiance, went on—when at length the inexpugnable instinct for democracy raised its head once more to ignore completely the ancient apparatus that alone had made that especial political ideal a reality, and which alone could make it a reality again, and preferred to exert itself through the medium of a thing which the monarchy had created for its own purposes. That thing was Parliament.

The exclusive attention which the reviving bourgeoisie gave to the struggle for initiative in legislation in Parliament, through the medium of its delegates, its representatives, its politicians (such was the order of development) meant that it was forgotten that the Nation-state had never been fitted out with democratic institutions.

Why?

Because they hailed this specious Parliament, ready to their hand, and failed to realise that the geographical differences between the old politocracy of the City-state and the new political group which they hoped to make a politocracy, the Nation-state, rendered it impossible to accept the King-created Parliament as a single substitute for the primary democratic assembly-the Ecclesia. The Ecclesia was the Polis: but the Parliament was not, in that sense, the nation. This fatal blunder was the more easily committed in that when times were vital to the future of liberty in England, the mass were politically apathetic, and, as has been indicated, the Parliament was in a sense a primary assembly of the politically effective class.

This, then, is the first contention: the Representative System is not democracy because it provides no surety that the conduct of civic life shall be the business of the

mass.

(2) The Poleis (City-states) which, in the record of human experience, have been the political units most favourable to the civic expression of themselves by their individual members, must be established within the Nation-unit, if that unit is to be an effective democracy.

In criticising modern "democracy" we found it radically deficient in the two characteristic excellences of real democracy. It was deficient first in a widely distributed initiative in determining the trend of civic progress. Secondly it was deficient in the corporate or communal expression of civic life in ideas, in literature, in art, in institutions, in public works-in all the various forms which may be taken by things which men achieve together as "political animals".

Now such distributed initiative and such communal expression have, historically, been best exhibited in that kind of political group which is called the City-state. Moreover, since therein are retained and perfected those elements in the historical City-state which were the conditions of its peculiar virtues, the two excellences which we have selected as characteristic of democracy would have been even more apparent in the ideal City-state conceived by Aristotle, the philosophic patron of such kinds of political groups. And the fact of historical occurrence not, at the moment, being material, it will be convenient and useful to consider this theoretic instance alongside the actual.

As the term is used it would not be incorrect to assert that several good and characteristic examples of Citystates have been democracies. But those examples which have most obviously displayed the two virtues italicised above have been founded on a servile basis, and have not, therefore, fulfilled the conditions which we have required in a real democracy. For instance, it was a cardinal principle in the ideal of Aristotle that economic activities, except so far as the management of a household

partook of that character, were unworthy of citizens. But since men had to live, and since, that they might live, there had to be butchers and bakers and candlestickmakers as well as artists in the liberal occupation of leisure, a distinction was drawn between civic and servile occupations, and consequently between citizens and slaves. The ancient world never faced the problem which is confronting the Nation-state and which is now under consideration-the enfranchisement of a mass of politically free but economically dependent artisans with the essential scope of citizenship. In the City-state livelihood was made easy for the slave, enfranchisement difficult. In the Nation-state the proletarian may easily record a vote, but is often in want of subsistence.

Within, however, the restricted area over which it was distributed, citizenship in the City-state was real. Not in our sense a democracy, it was in our sense a politocracy. Each individual was in actual and constant contact with the different phases of social and political life. Each was in a sense a 'public man". He had been in office: or was actually in office: or was qualified for office. He might watch a Phidias at work. He might walk in the Agora with Socrates. He might dispense justice as a Heliast. He might, indeed he must, pronounce upon or propose executive or legislative measures in the Ecclesia. The red rope drove the Athenian into the midst of affairs as potently as the red tape of our Own administrative departments keeps their working a jealous and distant secret from the Englishman. This intensity of Athenian citizenship bred a precocity, a productivity, a sublimity