will, in the future, be the same in the case of pure Democracy that, in
the past, it was in the case of the pure Autocracy of the Caesars, or
the case of the pure Aristocracy of Rome or of the so-called Republics
of the Middle Ages. A political edifice on shifting sands.

Yet, to-day what do we see and hear in America? Tell it not in Gath;
publish it not in the streets of Askalon I Two thousand years after the
time of Aristotle, we see a prevailing school working directly back to
the condition of affairs which existed in the Athenian agora under the
disapproving eyes of the father of political philosophy. Panaceas,
universal cure-alls, and quack remedies--the Initiative, the Referendum,
and the Recall are paraded as if these--nostrums of the mountebanks of
the county fair--would surely remedy the perplexing ills of new and
hitherto unheard-of social, economical, and political conditions.
Democracy! What is Democracy? Democracy, as it is generally understood,
I submit, is nothing but the reaching of political conclusions through
the frequent counting of noses; or, as Macaulay two generations ago
better phrased it, "the majority of citizens told by the head";--the
only question at just this juncture being whether, in order to the
arriving at more acceptable results, both sexes shall be "told," instead
of one sex only. Moreover, I with equal confidence make bold to suggest
that while conceded, and while men have even persuaded themselves that
they have faith in it, and really do believe in this "telling" of noses
as the best and fairest attainable means of reaching correct results,
yet in so doing and so professing they simply, as men are prone to do,
deceive themselves. In other words, victims of their own cant, they
preach a panacea in which they really do not believe. Nor of this is
proof far to seek. _Vox populi, vox Dei_! If you extend the application
of this principle by a single step, its loudest advocates draw back in
alarm from the inevitable. They seek refuge in the assertion--"Oh! That