Mexico, nominally a republic under President Diaz, was in reality a military autocracy of the severest kind. The South American Republics are merely unstable monarchies, at the mercy of men who can manipulate the political machinery and get control of the army. It is too early yet to decide whether the constitutional form of government set up in Turkey in 1908, or the republic created on the abolition of monarchy in Portugal in 1910, mark national movements to democracy. In neither country is there evidence that general political freedom has been the goal of the successful revolutionist, or that the people have obtained any considerable measure of political power or civil liberty. Ambitious and unscrupulous men can make full use of republican and democratic forms to gain political mastery over their less cunning fellows, and no machinery of government has ever yet been devised that will safeguard the weak and the foolish from the authority of the strong and the capable. Those who put their trust in theories of popular sovereignty, and urge the referendum and initiative as the surer instruments of democracy than Parliamentary representation, may recall that a popular plebiscite organised by Napoleon in 1802 conferred on him the Consulate for life; that Louis Napoleon was made President of the French Republic in 1848 by a popular vote, obtained a new constitution by a plebiscite in 1851, and a year later arranged another plebiscite which declared him hereditary Emperor, Napoleon III. France, where naturally Rousseau's theories have made the deepest impression, has since the Revolution gloried in the right of the "sovereign people" to overthrow the government, and its elected representatives have been alternately at the mercy of dictators and social revolutionists. On the whole, the stability of the British Government, rooted in the main on the traditional belief in the representation of the electorate, would seem to make more surely for national progress and wider political liberty than the alternation of revolution and reaction which France has known in the last hundred and twenty years. England has not been without its popular outbursts against what the American poet called "the never-ending audacity of elected persons," but these outbursts are commonly accepted as manifestations of intolerable conditions; and while the outbursts are repressed means are taken by Government to amend the conditions. When the Government fails to amend things, the House of Commons takes the matter up; and if the Commons neglect to do so, then the electors make it plain that amendment and reform are necessary by returning men to Parliament pledged to change matters, and by rejecting those who have failed to meet the situation. THE OBVIOUS DANGERS