exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some
very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal
type of a perfect government must be representative.



Chapter IV

Under what Social Conditions Representative Government is Inapplicable.


We have recognized in representative government the ideal type of the
most perfect polity for which, in consequence, any portion of mankind
are better adapted in proportion to their degree of general
improvement. As they range lower and lower in development, that form
of government will be, generally speaking, less suitable to them,
though this is not true universally; for the adaptation of a people to
representative government does not depend so much upon the place they
occupy in the general scale of humanity as upon the degree in which
they possess certain special requisites; requisites, however, so
closely connected with their degree of general advancement, that any
variation between the two is rather the exception than the rule. Let
us examine at what point in the descending series representative
government ceases altogether to be admissible, either through its own
unfitness or the superior fitness of some other regimen.

First, then, representative, like any other government, must be
unsuitable in any case in which it can not permanently
subsist--_i.e._, in which it does not fulfill the three fundamental
conditions enumerated in the first chapter. These were, 1. That the