In the preceding chapter I have dealt with the discussion of Proportional Representation in the British House of Commons in order to illustrate the intellectual squalor amidst which public affairs have to be handled at the present time, even in a country professedly “democratic.”  I have taken this one discussion as a sample to illustrate the present imperfection of our democratic instrument.  All over the world, in every country, great multitudes of intelligent and serious people are now inspired by the idea of a new order of things in the world, of a world-wide establishment of peace and mutual aid between nation and nation and man and man.  But, chiefly because of the elementary crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly anywhere at present, except at Washington, do these great ideas and this world-wide will find expression.  Amidst the other politicians and statesmen of the world President Wilson towers up with an effect almost divine.  But it is no ingratitude to him to say that he is not nearly so exceptional a being among educated men as he is among the official leaders of mankind.  Everywhere now one may find something of the Wilson purpose and intelligence, but nearly everywhere it is silenced or muffled or made ineffective by the political advantage of privileged or of violent and adventurous inferior men.  He is “one of us,” but it is his good fortune to have got his head out of the sack that is about the heads of most of us.  In the official world, in the world of rulers and representatives and “statesmen,” he almost alone, speaks for the modern intelligence.

This general stifling of the better intelligence of the world and its possible release to expression and power, seems to me to be the fundamental issue underlying all the present troubles of mankind.  We cannot get on while everywhere fools and vulgarians hold the levers that can kill, imprison, silence and starve men.  We cannot get on with false government and we cannot get on with mob government; we must have right government.  The intellectual people of the world have a duty of co-operation they have too long neglected.  The modernization of political institutions, the study of these institutions until we have worked out and achieved the very best and most efficient methods whereby the whole community of mankind may work together under the direction of its chosen intelligences, is the common duty of every one who has a brain for the service.  And before everything else we have to realize this crudity and imperfection in what we call “democracy” at the present time.  Democracy is still chiefly an aspiration, it is a spirit, it is an idea; for the most part its methods are still to seek.  And still more is this “League of Free Nations” as yet but an aspiration.  Let us not underrate the task before us.  Only the disinterested devotion of hundreds of thousands of active brains in school, in pulpit, in book and press and assembly can ever bring these redeeming conceptions down to the solid earth to rule.