Page:The International Socialist Review (1900-1918), Vol. 1, Issue 1.pdf/4

4 would be more certain than the utter defeat of any ticket having his name at the head.

Governments are the product of existing or conditions. They are not the result of deliberate choice. You cannot think of a democracy as possible in ancient Israel, or Greece, or Rome, or Egypt, or Babylon. And yet thinkers were not wanting in Greece and Rome who could conceive of such a thing as democracy. Plato dreamed of a republic. Aristotle shows a knowledge of the fundamental principle of democracy. But no sort of government was possible of realization in their day.

One hundred and years ago the Declaration of Independence was given to the world, and not long afterward a government was launched on these shores. But any one who has taken the trouble to think about the matter knows that scarcely any approach was made, in fact, toward a democracy. The status of a citizen in the thirteen colonies after the signing of that declaration, or even after the adoption of the constitution, was not materially different from what it was before. In 1775 they were all subjects of the British crown, in 1776 they had declared themselves independent of that authority. A few years later they were citizens of the United States of America. Had there been any great change in government? No. Suffrage was more general, perhaps, than it had been before. But to all intents and purposes the status of citizenship was unchanged. The people of that day could not have established a really revolutionary government, if they had wanted to. And the majority of them had no desire for such a thing. They could not have inaugurated a democracy. They could not have told what a democracy is—with the exception of Jefferson and a few others. Had they all been as intelligent as the writer of the Declaration, it would have made no difference. A whole nation of Thomas Jeffersons could not have inaugurated democracy at that time. The Declaration of Independence was a noble document, the greatest ever penned under such circumstances. But its ideals were as far from the intentions of the founders of this government as were those of Plato's "Republic" or Bellamy's "Equality." This government was not even avowedly based upon that Declaration. it was framed after the pattern of the English constitution. Englishmen framed it, and they framed exactly such a government as the Englishmen of that day might be expected to frame. But it made little difference what they wrote in the constitution. That did not determine and does not show the character of this government. Is is not true that the lawyers who constitute the Supreme Court of the United States are prepared to declare anything constitutional which the policy of the president calls for? If this nation should care to assume all the forms and adopt all the policies of an empire, eminent lawyers would