The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representative democracy was a mistake, raises the preliminary question whether the consent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of good government.  To this question Plato, who among the political philosophers of the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of a modern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered, No.  To him it was incredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleeting shadows of popular opinion.  He proposed, therefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his Republic should live under the despotic government of those who by ’slaving for it’[65] had acquired a knowledge of the reality which lay behind appearance.  Comte, writing when modern science was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the same proposal.  Mr. H.G.  Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous speculations, follows Plato.  He describes a Utopia which is the result of the forcible overthrow of representative government by a voluntary aristocracy of trained men of science.  He appeals, in a phrase consciously influenced by Plato’s metaphysics, to ’the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible world....’[66] There are some signs, in America as well as in England, that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both passionately in earnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in their experience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-blooded manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians, turn ‘back to Plato’; and when once this question is started, neither our existing mental habits nor our loyalty to democratic tradition will prevent it from being fully discussed.

[65] [Greek:  douleusanti te ktesei autou] (Republic, p. 494).

[66] Wells, A Modern Utopia, p. 263.  ’I know of no case for the elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes.  It is manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers....’  Wells, Anticipations, p. 147.

To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an experience of government without consent larger than any other that has ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation.  The Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about a thousand trained men.  They are selected under a system which ensures that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of government; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern.