latter, who were stated to have committed offences for which the maximum penalty was penal servitude for life, got off scot-free because they were members of a powerful organisation which was able to bring immense weight to bear on the Government.[2]

The ‘immense weight’ was, of course, the threat of virtually betraying the country to the Germans.  The country is at this moment at the mercy of any lawless faction which may choose either to hold the community to ransom by paralysing our trade and channels of supply, or by organised violence against life and property.  Democracy is powerless against sectional anarchism; and when such movements break out there is no remedy except by substituting for democracy a government of a very different type.

Democracy is, in fact, a disintegrating force.  It is strong in destruction, and tends to fall to pieces when the work of demolition (which may of course be a necessary task) is over.  Democracy dissolves communities into individuals and collects them again into mobs.  It pulls up by the roots the social order which civilisation has gradually evolved, and leaves men deracines, as Bourget says in one of his best novels, homeless and friendless, with no place ready for them to fill.  It is the opposite extreme to the caste system of India, which, with all its faults, does not seem to breed the European type of enrage, the enemy of society as such.

6.  The corruption of democracies proceeds directly from the fact that one class imposes the taxes and another class pays them.  The constitutional principle, ‘No taxation without representation,’ is utterly set at nought under a system which leaves certain classes without any effective representation at all.  At the present time it is said that one-tenth of the population pays five-sixths of the taxes.  The class which imposes the taxes has refused to touch the burden of the war with one of its fingers; and every month new doles at the public expense are distributed under the camouflage of ‘social reform.’  At every election the worldly goods of the minority are put up to auction.  This is far more immoral than the old-fashioned election bribery, which was a comparatively honest deal between two persons; and in its effects it is far more ruinous.  Democracy is likely to perish, like the monarchy of Louis XVI, through national bankruptcy.

Besides these defects, the democracy has ethical standards of its own, which differ widely from those of the educated classes.  Among the poor, ’generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one.  In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation.[3] In this country, at any rate, democracy means a victory of sentiment over reason.  Some may prefer the softer type of character, and may hope that it will