Page:Democracy, theoretical and practical (IA democracytheoret00hendrich).pdf/10



It is, true that people have sometimes controlled their rulers in the past, and that in the more enlightened countries of the world they have devised political machinery for controlling them more effectively. But there is a vast difference between actual governance and the control of those who govern. The number of men in any nation who have the capacity for the administration of great affairs is very small; the number of men and women who control them in the exercise of their powers may be reckoned by hundreds of thousands or millions, according to the size of the State. Yet so loose is the language we use in reference to government that the distinction between governing and the control of those who govern is overlooked or ignored. We live in an age of catch-words and shibboleths, and one of the most misleading and powerful of these is "government for the people by the people."

History is the record of human experience, and the best way to explode a shibboleth of this kind is to bring it to the test of experience. Theorists in the matters of government have nearly always paid too much homage to logic and too little to the importance of passion, prejudice, habit, and tradition. Some, like the anarchists, assume that men are so good that they do not need to be governed at all, and some, like the Bolshevist, that the poorer and more inexperienced they are the better they can manage human affairs. Nearly all of them fail to reckon with the difference between ideas that will work and theories that will merely create unrest or overturn the existing order. A course of study in the history of government would dispel many of these illusions. The, student of history needs insight, imagination, and enthusiasm in the prosecution of his work just as