Freedom and fulness of discussion is the very breath of life to popular institutions, and wheresoever any problem or range of problems is withdrawn from public discussion, there is a virtual denial of the democratic principle. When, for instance, and in particular, foreign policy is conducted behind closed doors, a control over the destinies of the people is vested in individuals or in a class of individuals which is as real and as monstrous as that of an autocrat; and democracy is denied in its most sensitive and critical part. It is true that the practice of secret diplomacy has survived because nations have been too little concerned about their external affairs; and no plausible arguments about “delicate situations” and the like could resist for a moment the insistence of an intelligent democracy upon the management of its own affairs. If democracy is to survive at all, it must make up its mind speedily that the principle of its inner life shall not be denied in its outer. But if democracy is to have a mind at all, it must learn to use the mind it has; and the chief stimulus to this end would be the multiplication of centres of discussion. This would be materially helped if government departments were required to produce not only ponderous blue-books which only bewilder the common man, and official documents intelligible only to the expert, but popular accounts, published regularly, of their proceedings. The press should be used far more extensively for this purpose; and even the children of the public schools should be provided with appropriate graded summaries of the acts of the national government. Then on the basis of this material for discussion, the social debating society, the reading circle, the Forum and all such groups would become the living and increasing springs of democracy.