furtherance of the common welfare on equal terms. This idea was the
greatest social conception that the human mind had up to that time ever
formed. It contained, when first conceived, the promise and potency of a
complete transformation of all then existing social institutions, one and
all of which had hitherto been based and formed on the principle of
personal and class privilege and authority and the domination and selfish
use of the many by the few. But it was simply inconsistent with the
limitations of the human intellect that the implications of an idea so
prodigious should at once have been taken in. The idea must absolutely
have time to grow. The entire present order of economic democracy and
equality was indeed logically bound up in the first full statement of the
democratic idea, but only as the full-grown tree is in the seed: in the
one case, as in the other, time was an essential element in the evolution
of the result.

"We divide the history of the evolution of the democratic idea into two
broadly contrasted phases. The first of these we call the phase of
negative democracy. To understand it we must consider how the democratic
idea originated. Ideas are born of previous ideas and are long in
outgrowing the characteristics and limitations impressed on them by the
circumstances under which they came into existence. The idea of popular
government, in the case of America as in previous republican experiments
in general, was a protest against royal government and its abuses.
Nothing is more certain than that the signers of the immortal Declaration
had no idea that democracy necessarily meant anything more than a device
for getting along without kings. They conceived of it as a change in the
forms of government only, and not at all in the principles and purposes
of government.

"They were not, indeed, wholly without misgivings lest it might some time