Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/188

 the history of democracy. It is, in detail, the history of all such characteristically democratic masterpieces as Bryanism, Ku Kluxery, and the war to end war. They are full of virtuous pretences, and they are unmitigated swindles.

All observers of democracy, from Tocqueville to the Adams brothers and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, have marveled at its corruptions on the political side, and speculated heavily as to the causes thereof. The fact was noted in the earliest days of the democratic movement, and Friedrich von Gentz, who began life as an Anglomaniac, was using it as an argument against the parliamentary system so early as 1809. Gentz, who served Metternich as the current Washington correspondents serve whatever dullard happens to be President, contended that the introduction of democracy on the Continent would bring in a reign of bribery, and thus destroy the integrity and authority of the state. The proofs that he was right were already piling up, in his day, in the United States. They were destined to be greatly reinforced when the Third Republic got under way in France in 1870, and to be given impressive support when the German Republic set up shop in 1918. In 1919, for the first time