Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DEMOCRACY Public men in England occasionally speak of democracy, or the democracy. The latter expression probably refers in a vague way to that part of the population which Mr. Gladstone was wont to describe as the masses, in contrast with the classes. A close definition of the expression in either of its forms is difficult. When Mr. Balfour, speaking in the House of Commons on Women's Suffrage, said: A democracy, properly speaking, is government by consent. . . . Properly understood, it is the only possible government for any nation at the stage of political evolution which we have reached, he used the term, no doubt, in its philosophic sense, whatever that may be. Leaders of the Liberal party speaking of the democracy generally mean the masses of the people who are workers. The Earl of Selborne dealing with the subject of the Referendum in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (July 1911), said that the government of the United Kingdom is now a democracy, and a democracy of a very pure type, and Mr. Lloyd George at Bath on November 24th, 1911, is reported by the Daily Chronicle and several other morning papers including The Times, as saying in a public speech: You want a straightforward simple franchise. Why do they distrust the democracy ? I lay down this proposition. Democracy has never been a menace to property. I will tell you what has been a menace to property. When power has been withheld from the democracy, when they had no voice in the government, when they were oppressed and they had no means of securing redress, except violence. Then property has many times been swept away. Property has never been damaged by pure democracy. The last eight words in which the expression pure democracy occurs, are the important part of this ...
Synopsis
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