The personal practice of democracy is comparatively simple, as its central doctrine is. The equal worth of souls does not of course imply equal capacity; nor does the fact of unequal natural capacity do away with the truth of equal worth. It simply indicates the kind of world we live in. It is a world in which capacity is the measure not of worth but of obligation; and the law of life is mutual service. In one of the very few political allusions which Jesus made, He stated this point with much plainness. “Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and they that have authority over them are called ‘benefactors’” (as it was in the beginning, and has been ever since, when autocrats and their like have conceded to their subjects some fragment of the natural rights of which they have despoiled them and then have posed as “benefactors,” and when imperialists talk of conferring their peculiar _Kultur_ on the “lesser breeds without the law”), “but,” said Jesus, “it shall not be so among you. He that is greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” This is the authentic democratic spirit and the personal practice without which democracy cannot live. It is not enough to pay lip service to democratic ideals—the sanctity of personality and the obligation of mutual service; or even to accept them in a spirit of pious sentimentalism. That kind of thing is already common enough. To the idealistic temper, we must attach the pragmatic habit, and translate our doctrines into concrete programmes of emancipation and co-operation. The city of God is not to be built with good intentions. Fraternity must be rendered into a polity. Yet even fraternity may perish in formality except it be sustained by a living brotherliness. _It is the spirit that quickeneth._ Democracy like every living thing must either grow or decay. If it stops at a political form or an economic scheme, then it must decline and die. It is only as its essential spirit captures our consciences and wills and its central principle is consistently and continuously applied that it can survive the perversity of our nature and the vicissitudes of history. It must become a crusade and a holy war. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter II. THE TESTS OF DEMOCRATIC PROGRESS “The fundamental reform for which the times call is rather a reconsideration of the ends for which all civilised government exists, in a word, the return to a saner measure of social values.”—LORD MORLEY.