it was in every country in Europe; there were elections; all the men
voted. And mind you, the elections were not so very far apart. Most
people living at one election could remember the last, so there was no
time for abuses to spring up.... Well, everybody voted. If a man wanted
one thing he voted one way, and if he wanted another thing he voted the
other way. The people for whom he voted would then meet, and with a
sense of duty which I cannot exaggerate they would work month after
month exactly to reproduce the will of those who had appointed them. It
was a great time!"

"Yet," said I, "even so there must have been occasional divergences
between what these people did and what the nation wanted."

"I see what you mean," he said, musing, "you mean that all the devotion
in the world, the purest of motives and the most devoted sense of duty,
could not keep the elected always in contact with the electors. You are
right. But you must remember that in every country there was a
machinery, with regard to the most important measures at least, which
could throw the matter before the electors to be re-decided. I can
remember no important occasion upon which the machinery was not brought
into use."

"But, after all, the value of the decisions of the electorate you are
describing," said I, continuing to humour him, "would depend upon the
information which the electorate had received as well as upon their
judgment."

"As for their judgment," he said, a little shortly, "it is not for our
time to criticize theirs. Human judgment is not infallible, but I can
well remember how in every nation of Europe it was the fixed conviction