The Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races have little of the seer in their constitution. They are better at meeting and enduring disaster than at foreseeing and forestalling it. They are suspicious of prophets and prophecy, because they have none of the gifts that would enable them to indulge in vaticinations themselves. Not being possessed of any capacity for divining the ultimate bourne of current tendencies, they doubt very much whether it is possible for any man to foretell that bourne, or to describe it in anticipation. They are completely wedded to the doctrine of experience. “What you have not experienced you cannot possibly know,”—this is the ultimate epistemological doctrine of these two races. The consequence of this is that they are constantly in the precarious position of him who, knowing nothing of poisons, and being quite unable to predict their possible effect, has to wait for the consequence of having partaken of strange drugs before he can know whether they are good for him or not. Such an attitude would be excusable at the dawn of history, at the beginning of human life, or in the Garden of Eden. It seems quite inexcusable in the present Age. And yet, although the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races have the whole of the accumulated history of civilized mankind, and the whole of the tradition of humanity, at their command, they still persist in demanding individual experience of everything, before they will pronounce upon it. The fact that in such circumstances one may quite easily _die_ of experience, or at least fall into a hopeless decline as the result of it, never seems to occur to them. They go blundering on, refusing to learn from the lessons of previous civilizations, and determined to allow every possible experience of mankind to work its worst consequences upon them, as if these consequences had never been heard of in the world before. It is so with Democracy, and it will be so with Ochlocracy. These things have been tried before. They are known, and have proved fatal to the civilization that tried them. But what is that to the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon? He has no personal experience of their evils, and is therefore determined to stake the fate of his civilization on trying them. Even without actual experience of their evils, either in the present or the past, it would be simple for anyone, equipped with only a little insight and wisdom, to foresee exactly whither democracy will lead, whither it must lead, whither it cannot help leading; for you cannot conduct any institution with a committee consisting of everybody, without condemning that institution to immediate or ultimate disaster. Democracy has only to be thought about for a few hours, in order to be dismissed as the most stupid of all forms of government. Even if other civilizations had failed to try it, even if democracy were a hitherto unexplored field, a moment’s reflection would be sufficient to enable one to condemn it as utterly hopeless.