If democracy be conceived not as a form of political government under the _régime_ of universal suffrage, but as a condition of freedom under moral control, permitting every man to do as he likes, so long as he does not trench upon the equal right of every other man, deliverance from the sophistries and absurdities of current social and political discussion becomes easy and inevitable. Its real problems cease to be an endless succession of political devices that stimulate cunning and evasion, and countless encroachments upon individual freedom that stir up contention and ill feeling. Instead of being innumerable and complex, defying the solvent power of the greatest intellects and the efforts of the most enthusiastic philanthropists, they become few and simple. While their proper solution is beset with difficulties, these difficulties are not as hopeless as the framing of a statute to produce a growth of virtue in a depraved heart. Indeed, no such task has ever been accomplished, and every effort in that direction has been worse than futile. It has encouraged the growth of all the savage traits that ages of conflict have stamped so profoundly in the nervous system of the race. But let it be understood that the real problems of democracy are the problems of self-support and self-control, the problems that appeared with the appearance of human life, and that their sole solution is to be found in the application of precisely the same methods with which Nature disciplines the meanest of her creatures, then we may expect a measure of success from the efforts of social and political reformers; for freedom of thought and action, coupled with the punishment that comes from a failure to comply with the laws of life and the conditions of existence, creates an internal control far more potent than any law. It impels men to depend upon their own efforts to gain a livelihood; it inspires them with a respect for the right of others to do the same.