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: CHAPTER VI. DEMOCRACY AND DEMOCRACIES. 194- We understand by democracy the polity in which the people or community, as an organized whole, has the chief power in its hands, and can through its agents manage the government for what seems to it to be its welfare. The doctrine that all power is ultimately derived from the community may be consistent with the choice of a life-long tyrant or a hereditary line of kings; but the transfer of power to an authority like either of these destroys the democracy itself, even if the tyrant or the king administers affairs for the general good and not for his own separate interests. On the other hand, when there exists a clearly defined democracy, the welfare of the lower class, or of a party or of a section of the country may be aimed at by the government, to the injury of the country as a whole, without putting an end to the democracy. The form determines its nature, the spirit its quality. Again, we may doubt whether a polity deserves the name of a democracy, when a considerable number of citizens are excluded from political rights. One case of this kind we have considered?that where a large body of slaves exists and the active citizens do not amount to half their number. The polity would be seriously affected if they should be set free and receive civic rights. It would then be a democracy indeed, but would it be such if they remained in servitude ? The ancients, where slaves were found under every form of polity, did not count them in at all, as changing the forms of states, any more than children and women. They were in all polities a cafttt mortitnm, and did not affect the differences between one polity and another. It may be asked again whether that be a democracy where restrictions on the right of suffrage or the right o...
Synopsis
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