So, I suppose, I may contribute to a book with such a title as "The Defenders of Democracy." For now I am sure that democracy has promise and hope in it. Only I am not sure that democracy has even begun to understand itself. The common people have displayed virtues so great that those who have seen them unite in a chorus of praise. Their leaders, elected persons, guides chosen by votes and popular acclamation, have shown in a hundred ways that they will not, dare not, trust the people. Our silly censorships, our concealments of unpleasant truths, our suppression of criticism, our galling infringements of personal liberty, witness to the fact that authority distrusts the source from which it sprang; that the leaders of our democracy reckon the common people unfit to know, to think or to act. If we are defending democracy we are sacrificing liberty. Will you, in America, do better in this respect than we have done? you believed in the common people before England did. You believe in them, if we may trust your words, more completely than England does. Do you believe in them sufficiently to trust them? Or do you think that democracy can be defended only after it has been blindfolded, hand-cuffed and gagged? This is what you have got to show the world. No one doubts that you can fight. No one doubts that you will fight, with all your strength, as England is fighting. What we wonder is whether your great principle of government, by the people and for the people, will stand the test of a war like this. [signed]James O. Hannay The New Comradeship Democracy is the outward and visible sign that a nation recognizes its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because alone it recognizes States as organisms, with spontaneous growth, and a free will of their own. Democracy is final; other forms of government are but steps on the way to it. It is the big thing, because it can and does embody and make use of Aristocracy. It is the rule of the future, because all human progress gradually tends to recognition of God in man, and not outside of him; to the establishment of the humanistic creed, and the belief that we have the future in our own hands. In life at large, whom does one respect--the man who gropes and stumbles upward to control of his instincts, and full development of his powers, confronting each new darkness and obstacle as it arises; or the man who shelters in a cloister, and lives by rote and rules hung up for him by another in his cell? The first man lives, the second does but exist. So it is with nations.