Everyone who considers the relation of liberty to the institutions of a state will, I think, find it difficult to resist the conclusion that without democracy there cannot be liberty. That is not an over-popular thesis in our time. A reaction against democratic ideals is the fashion, and the dictatorships which proliferate over half Europe are earnest in maintaining their obsolescence. Yet consider, for a moment, what democracy implies. It involves a frame of government in which, first, men are given the chance of making the government under which they live, in which, also, the laws that government promulgates are binding equally upon all. I do not think the average man can be made happy merely by living in a democracy: I do not see how he can avoid a sense of continuous frustration unless he does. For if he does not share in making the government, if he cannot, where his fellows so choose, be himself made one of the rulers of the state, he is excluded from that which secures him the certainty that his experience counts. To read the history of England before the enfranchisement of the wage-earner is to realize that however small is the value of the franchise it still assures the attention of government to grievance. The right, therefore, to the franchise is essential to liberty; and a citizen excluded from it is unfree. Unfree for the simple reason that the rulers of the state will not regard his will as entitled to consideration in the making of policy. They will do things for him, but not those things he himself regards as urgent; as Parliament a hundred years ago met the grim problem of urban want by building more churches to the glory of the Lord. Whatever is to be said against the democratic form of state, it seems to me unquestionable that it has forced the needs of humble men on the attention of government in a way impossible under any other form. To be free a people must be able to choose its rulers at stated intervals simply because there is no other way in which their wants, as they experience those wants, will receive attention. It is fundamental to the conference of power that it should never be permanent. If it is so, it ceases to give attention to the purposes for which it is conferred and thinks only of the well-being of those who can exercise it. That has been, notably, the history of monarchy and aristocracy, and in general, of the practice of colonial dominion. Power that is unaccountable makes instruments of men who should be ends in themselves. Responsible government in a democracy lives always in the shadow of coming defeat; and this makes it eager to satisfy those with whose destinies it is charged.