Few British people of liberal mind are able to look back upon that period of their history which gathers around the Boer War without a certain humiliation. Professor L. T. Hobhouse ascribes the popular defection of the British people from the democratic principle and temper during that time to four causes: (_a_) the decay of profound and vivid religious belief; (_b_) the diffusion of a stream of German idealism “which has swelled the current of retrogression from the plain rationalistic way of looking at life and its problems,” and which has stimulated the growth of the doctrine of the absolute state and its imperialistic corollaries; (_c_) the career of Prince Bismarck, and (_d_) “by far the most potent intellectual support of the reaction ... the belief that physical science has given its verdict (for it came to this) in favour of violence against social justice.” This provides us with an instance (so plain that another were superfluous) of the inability of an unfulfilled democratic order to resist alien and hostile influences that may be “in the air,” and of its consequent perversion to ends which belie its own first principles. It is the permanent danger of democracy when it is not sustained and inspired by a generous moral impulse to be prostituted to undemocratic ends. “It is at best” (to quote Mr. Hobhouse again) “an instrument with which men who hold by the ideal of social justice and human progress can work; but when these ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base uses.” Lord Morley, with a similar sensitiveness to the perils of democracy asks whether we mean by it “a doctrine or a force; constitutional parchment or a glorious evangel; perfected machinery for the wire-puller, the party-tactician, the spoils-man and the boss, or the high and stern ideals of a Mazzini or a Tolstoi.” It may, indeed, be reasonably held that worse has befallen it than Lord Morley’s fears. We have evidence how frequently democracy has in practice become the tool of strong and unscrupulous men and gangs of such men seeking selfish and corrupt ends; and how, for Lincoln’s famous formula, we have had government of the people by a well-to-do oligarchy in the interest of the privileged classes.