This led to renewed efforts on the part of white European workers to understand and apply their political power to its reform through democratic control.

Whether known as Communism or Socialism or what not, these efforts are neither new nor strange nor terrible, but world-old and seeking an absolutely justifiable human ideal—­the only ideal that can be sought:  the direction of individual action in industry so as to secure the greatest good of all.  Marxism was one method of accomplishing this, and its panacea was the doing away with private property in machines and materials.  Two mighty attacks were made on this proposal.  One was an attack on the fundamental democratic foundation:  modern European white industry does not even theoretically seek the good of all, but simply of all Europeans.  This attack was virtually unanswered—­indeed some Socialists openly excluded Negroes and Asiatics from their scheme.  From this it was easy to drift into that form of syndicalism which asks socialism for the skilled laborer only and leaves the common laborer in his bonds.

This throws us back on fundamentals.  It compels us again to examine the roots of democracy.

Who may be excluded from a share in the ruling of men?  Time and time again the world has answered: 

The Ignorant
The Inexperienced
The Guarded
The Unwilling

That is, we have assumed that only the intelligent should vote, or those who know how to rule men, or those who are not under benevolent guardianship, or those who ardently desire the right.

These restrictions are not arguments for the wide distribution of the ballot—­they are rather reasons for restriction addressed to the self-interest of the present real rulers.  We say easily, for instance, “The ignorant ought not to vote.”  We would say, “No civilized state should have citizens too ignorant to participate in government,” and this statement is but a step to the fact:  that no state is civilized which has citizens too ignorant to help rule it.  Or, in other words, education is not a prerequisite to political control—­political control is the cause of popular education.

Again, to make experience a qualification for the franchise is absurd:  it would stop the spread of democracy and make political power hereditary, a prerequisite of a class, caste, race, or sex.  It has of course been soberly argued that only white folk or Englishmen, or men, are really capable of exercising sovereign power in a modern state.  The statement proves too much:  only yesterday it was Englishmen of high descent, or men of “blood,” or sovereigns “by divine right” who could rule.  Today the civilized world is being ruled by the descendants of persons who a century ago were pronounced incapable of ever developing a self-ruling people.  In every modern state there must come to the polls every generation, and indeed every year, men who are inexperienced in the solutions of the political problems that confront them and who must experiment in methods of ruling men.  Thus and thus only will civilization grow.