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CHAPTER XIV

More Democracy

Democracy is not a new idea born of the twentieth century. The rule of the people existed away back in the days of ancient Greece, in which land the word democracy itself was coined. "Demos" was then a term of greater import than king or lord; but to the Grecians "the people" did not mean all the people, for the slaves were many, the captives of many wars, ofttimes educated and refined, yet without voice or vote.

The end of the struggle of the centuries has been not only that the people might rule in place of king or aristocrat, but that all the people,-freed from bondage, educated and lifted out of dire poverty, might be fitted for the noble duties of citizenship. If democracy means the rule of the people, the rule of all the people, then the weaker must be aided and educated by the stronger, until every vote shall be an honest and intelligent vote.

Such a hope may seem Utopian in an age of greed and graft, yet it has never died out in the human heart but has rather grown stronger as the centuries have slipped by with their ever-increasing light and liberty.

Perhaps it is only natural that the strong should seek to rule the weak, and history records it as a fact in every land. Sometimes it is the rule of royalty, sometimes the rule of bureaucrats, sometimes that of industrial lords, but whatever form it assumes, it always results in the exploitation of the weak by those who have grown strong at their expense. Read the story of the early struggles for life and liberty, and you will find that the objects sought for are in substance the same as the demands of today, although the names may be changed.

The Republics of Greece became the teachers of the world in democratic ideas, although they could not rise entirely above the belief that a poor man was unfitted for citizenship. Among the German tribes, all freeman were citizens in a democratic society, but gradually as feudalism grew in power, the majority of the freeborn people became subject to the nobles,

and were scarcely to be distinguished from the serfs of the land. The nobility branded these masses as "the common people," "the canaille," who were once known as "the people," free citizens of a free republic. were either warriors or granted for valor in war.

Those who ruled possessors of land Dark ages followed

one another in which the cause of rule of the people was eclipsed, but the rise of the city and the beginnings of industrialism brought a change. Leaders in commerce demanded their rights and received them; then the trades or guilds asserted their claims for recognition, and after many bloody contests were victorious. The agriculturalists were less able to gain recognition, and were held in serfdom long years after their brothers in the cities were made freemen. Although the democratic principle was gaining recognition through a larger number being included in the ruling body, yet the great mass outside were still looked down upon as the common herd. The French Revolution wrought a change throughout Europe, and "Liberty, fraternity and equality" became the rallying cry in every land, and the people began to claim rights as against the aristocracy.

The settlement of America seemed to furnish the place for the final working out of the ideals of democracy; here was to be witnessed the rise of the common people; the uplift of the average of humanity was now to be made possible; for aristocracy, that foe to the common good, was to be left behind, and the desire for civil liberty was to be strengthened by the passion for religious liberty.

The Pilgrim Fathers sought to create a state of society where equality in all things might become permanent. Later the Declaration of Independence embodied the best thought of the world in the statement of the belief in human equality, and here and now democracy was seen to have a free field to work out the salvation of the people, both from the evils of monarchy and aristocracy. The Fathers planned and labored well, and civil and religious liberty seemed assured in America-the land of the free. Political democracy, although not absolute, but only representative might here have become a greater success had not the growth of modern industrialism, at first with its intense individualism, and then with its mighty combinations, wrought havoc

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with the earlier ideals of liberty and equality. A new feudalism of capital was established, and the lords of the money power looked upon the masses as did the feudal lords of the middle ages, and called them "the people.' The Fathers were not willing to trust the people with the rights of a true democracy, as was done in lands where all the people ruled directly, as in Switzerland, or ancient Athens, and so they established the device of representative democracy, according to which the representatives spoke and acted for the people who chose them. Because of this method, the lords of misrule have been able, by the use of gold, too often to win the support of those whom the people trusted. Within the last quarter century, there has been formed within this nation an aristocracy of wealth even more baneful than the old world aristocracy of birth. Power has become concentrated in the hands of the few, and they have used this power of the dollar to nullify laws, defeat justice, defy the government, and corrupt the ballot-box. What matters it if there is less of wretched poverty in this favored land than in other lands, if political and industrial democ

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