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40 :—How successfully dispose of it? Uniformly, in one way. Those problems are successfully solved, if at all, only when their solution is placed in the hands of the most proficient. Judged by the discussions of to-day, what advance has in politics been effected? Do the Outlook and the Commoner imply progress since the Stagirite? Not to any noticeable extent. We are, on the contrary, fumbling and wallowing about where the Greek pondered and philosophized.

Democracy, as it is called, is to-day the great panacea,—the political nostrum; as such it is confidently advocated by statesmen and professors and even by the presidents of our institutions of the advanced education. "Trust the People" is the shibboleth! "Let the People rule!" "The cure for too much Liberty is more Liberty!" To Democracy plain and simple—Composite Wisdom—I frankly confess I feel no call,—no call greater than, for instance, towards Autocracy or Aristocracy or Plutocracy. Taken simply, and applied as hitherto applied, all and each lead to but one result,—failure! And that result, let me here predict, will, in the future, be the same in the case of pure Democracy that, in the past, it was in the case of the pure Autocracy of the Cæsars, or the case of the pure Aristocracy of Rome or of the so-called Republics of the Middle Ages. A political edifice on shifting sands.

Yet, to-day what do we see and hear in America? Tell it not in Gath; publish it not in the streets of Askalon! Two thousand years after the time of Aristotle, we see a