Defeat in the present war would shake popular institutions to their foundations in England as well as France; possibly also in regions which are more remote than either of these. But something far short of defeat--anything indeed in the nature of a drawn game or stalemate--would assuredly bring the credit of democracy so low that it would be driven to make some composition with its creditors.
Words, like other currencies, have a way of changing their values as the world grows older. Until comparatively recent times 'democracy' was a term of contempt, as 'demagogue' still is to-day.
The founders of American Union abhorred 'Democracy,'[1] and took every precaution which occurred to them in order to ward it off. Their aim was { 170} 'Popular,' or 'Representative Government'--a thing which they conceived to lie almost at the opposite pole. Their ideal was a state, the citizens of which chose their leaders at stated intervals, and trusted them. Democracy, as it appeared in their eyes, was a political chaos where the people chose its servants, and expected from them only servility. There was an ever-present danger, calling for stringent safeguards, that the first, which they esteemed the best of all constitutional arrangements, would degenerate into the second, which they judged to be the worst.
Until times not so very remote it was only the enemies of Representative Government, or its most cringing flatterers, who spoke of it by the title of Democracy. Gradually, however, in the looseness of popular discussions, the sharpness of the original distinction wore off, so that the ideal system and its opposite--the good and the evil--are now confounded together under one name. There is no use fighting against current terminology; but it is well to bear in mind that terminology has no power to alter facts, and that the difference between the two principles still remains as wide as it was at the beginning.
When a people becomes so self-complacent that it mistakes its own ignorance for omniscience--so jealous of authority and impatient of contradiction that it refuses to invest with more than a mere shadow of power those whose business it is to govern--when the stock of leadership gives out, or remains hidden and undiscovered under a litter of showy refuse--when those who succeed in pushing themselves to the front are chiefly concerned not to lead, but merely to act the parts of leaders 'in silver slippers and amid applause'--when the chiefs of parties are { 171} so fearful of unpopularity that they will not assert their own opinions, or utter timely warnings, or proclaim what they know to be the truth--when such things as these come to pass the nation has reached that state which was dreaded by the framers of the American Constitution, and which--intending to warn mankind against it--they branded as 'Democracy.'