Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/107

 refuse to do these things. Finally, they could, if they would, abandon the republican form of government altogether, and set up a monarchy in place of it; during the late war they actually did so in fact, though refraining from saying so frankly. They could do all of these things freely and even legally, without departing in the slightest from the principles of their fundamental compact, and no exterior agency could make them do any of them unwillingly.

It is thus idle to amass proofs, as Hans Delbrück does with great diligence, that the result of this or that election was not a manifestation of a concrete popular wish. The answer, nine times out of ten, is that there was no popular wish. The populace simply passed over the matters principally at issue as incomprehensible or unimportant, and voted irrelevantly or wantonly. Or, in large part, it kept away from the polls. Both actions might be defended plausibly by democratic theorists. The people, if they are actually sovereign, have a clear right to be wanton when the spirit moves them, and indifference to an issue is an expression of opinion about it. Thus there is little appositeness in the saying of another German, the philosopher Hegel, that the