Nevertheless the current has set steadily in one direction: toward
democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and
that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself
shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are
a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake
of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not
the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political
phase. Belief in this political aspect is not a mystic faith as if
in some overruling providence that cares for children, drunkards and
others unable to help themselves. It marks a well-attested conclusion
from historic facts. We have every reason to think that whatever
changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be
of a sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and
criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form
and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense
the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime
difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which
a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as
to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily
precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery. We are not
concerned therefore to set forth counsels as to advisable improvements
in the political forms of democracy. Many have been suggested. It is no
derogation of their relative worth to say that consideration of these
changes is not at present an affair of primary importance. The problem
lies deeper; it is in the first instance an intellectual problem: the
search for conditions under which the Great Society may become the
Great Community. When these conditions are brought into being they will
make their own forms. Until they have come about, it is somewhat futile
to consider what political machinery will suit them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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