interregnum of nondescript, _faineant_ government intervening
between the decadence of virile monarchy in the eighteenth century and
the rise of positive democracy in the twentieth. The period may be
compared to that of the minority of a king, during which the royal power
is abused by wicked stewards. The people had been proclaimed as
sovereign, but they had not yet assumed the sceptre."

"And yet," said I, "during the latter part of the nineteenth century,
when, as you say, the world had not yet seen a single specimen of popular
government, our wise men were telling us that the democratic system had
been fully tested and was ready to be judged on its results. Not a few of
them, indeed, went so far as to say that the democratic experiment had
proved a failure when, in point of fact, it seems that no experiment in
democracy, properly understood, had as yet ever been so much as
attempted."

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"It is a very sympathetic task," he said, "to explain the slowness of the
masses in feeling their way to a comprehension of all that the democratic
idea meant for them, but it is one equally difficult and thankless to
account for the blank failure of the philosophers, historians, and
statesmen of your day to arrive at an intelligent estimate of the logical
content of democracy and to forecast its outcome. Surely the very
smallness of the practical results thus far achieved by the democratic
movement as compared with the magnitude of its proposition and the forces
behind it ought to have suggested to them that its evolution was yet but
in the first stage. How could intelligent men delude themselves with the
notion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time had
exhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing the title