It is the old, vicious circle; spiritual energy declines or is diverted into wrong channels; thereupon the physical forms, social, industrial, political, slip a degree or two lower out of sympathy with the failing energy, and these in their turn exert a degrading influence on the waning spiritual force, which declines still further only to be pulled lower still by the material agencies which continue their progressive declension.  Theories, no matter how high-minded and altruistic, cannot stand before a condition such as this, for self-protection decrees otherwise even if the higher motive of doing right things and getting right things just because they are right, does not come into effective operation.  The evil results of the institutions I have catalogued above are not to be denied, and the institutions themselves must be reformed or altogether abandoned, in the face of the loud-mouthed exhortations of those who now make them their means of livelihood, and even at the expense of the honest upholders of theories and doctrines that do credit to their humanitarianism but have been weighed and found wanting.

I am anxious not to put this plan for the reform, in root and branch, of our political institutions, on the low level of mere caution and self-defense.  The motive power of this is fear, and fear is only second to hate in its present position as a controlling force in society.  We should have good government not because it is economical and ensures what are known as “good business conditions,” and promises a peaceful continuance of society, but because it is as worthy an object of creative endeavour as noble art or a great literature or a just and merciful economic system, or a life that is full of joy and beauty and wholesome labour.  The political organism is in a sense the microcosm of life itself, and it should be society lifted up to a level of dignity, majesty and nobility.  The doctrine that in a democracy the government must exactly express the numerical preponderance in the social synthesis, and that, if this happens to be ignorant, mannerless and corrupt, then the government must be after the same fashion, is a low and a cowardly doctrine.  Government should be better than the majority; better than the minority if this has advantage over the other.  It should be of the best that man can compass, resting above him as in some sort an ideal; the visible expression of his better self, and the better self of the society of which he is a part.  If a political system, any political system, produces any other result; if it has issue in a representation of the lowest and basest in society, or even of the general average, then it is a bad system and it must be redeemed or it will bring an end that is couched in terms of catastrophe.