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Rh adherents — towards which the multitude continues to be unconditionally the passive object. "Popular self-determination" is a courteous figure of speech — in reality, under a universal-inorganic franchise, election has soon ceased to possess its original meaning. The more radical the political elimination of the matured old order of Estates and callings, the more formless and feckless the electoral mass, the more completely is it delivered into the hands of the new powers, the party leaders, who dictate their will to the people through all the machinery of intellectual compulsion; fence with each other for primacy by methods which in the end the multitude can neither perceive nor comprehend; and treat public opinion merely as a weapon to be forged and used for blows at each other. But this very process, viewed from another angle, is seen as an irresistible tendency driving every democracy further and further on the road to suicide.

The fundamental rights of a Classical people (demos, populus) extended to the holding of the highest state and judicial offices. For the exercise of these the people was "in form" in its Forum, where the Euclidean point-mass was corporeally assembled, and there it was the object of an influencing process in the Classical style; namely, by bodily, near, and sensuous means — by a rhetoric that worked upon every ear and eye; by devices many of which to us would be repellent and almost intolerable, such as rehearsed sob-effects and the rending of garments; by shameless flattery of the audience, fantastic lies about opponents; by the employment of brilliant phrases and resounding cadenzas (of which there came to be a perfect repertory for this place and purpose) by games and presents; by threats and blows; but, above all, by money. We have its beginnings in the Athens of 400, and its appalling culmination