May we not say, speaking largely, that there has always been a democratic tendency, whose advance has been conditioned by the possibility, under actual conditions, of organizing popular thought and will on a wide scale? Free coöperation is natural and human; it takes place spontaneously among children on the playground, among settlers in new countries, and among the most primitive sorts of men—everywhere, in short, where the secondary and artificial discipline has not supplanted it. The latter, including every sort of coercive or mechanical control is, of course, natural in the larger sense, and functional in human development; but there must ever be some resistance to it, which will tend to become effective when the control ceases to be maintained by the pressure of expediency. Accordingly we see that throughout modern history, and especially during the past century, there has been a progressive humanism, a striving to clear away lower forms of coöperation no longer essential, and to substitute something congenial to natural impulse. Discussion regarding the comparative merits of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy has come to be looked upon as scholastic. The world is clearly democratizing; it is only a question of how fast the movement can take place, and what, under various conditions, it really involves. Democracy, instead of being a single and definite political type, proves to be merely a principle of breadth in organization, naturally prevalent wherever men have learned how to work it, under which life will be at least as various in its forms as it was before. It involves a change in the character of social discipline not confined to politics, but as much at home in one sphere as another. With facility of communication as its mechanical basis, it proceeds inevitably to discuss and experiment with freer modes of action in religion, industry, education, philanthropy and the family. The law of the survival of the fittest will prevail in regard to social institutions, as it has in the past, but the conditions of fitness have undergone a change the implications of which we can but dimly foresee. FOOTNOTES: [45] Pages 169, 171. [46] F. S. Dellenbaugh, The North Americans of Yesterday, 416. [47] J. R. Green, History of the English People, i, 13. [48] J. Donovan, The Festal Origin of Human Speech. Mind, October, 1891. [49] “Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis.”—Horace, Ars Poet., 122. [50] J. O. Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, 315, 316. A publication of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology. [51] Quoted by Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, i, 194, 195. [52] The Spirit of Laws, book ix, chap. 1. [53] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 24. [54] One of many illuminating phrases introduced by T. V. Veblen in his work on The Theory of the Leisure Class. CHAPTER XII THE THEORY OF PUBLIC OPINION