Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/533

Rh stand alone; the organisation of a spiritual and secular aristocracy is necessarily and invariably hierarchical.

Medieval Christianity, the Catholic church, is essentially aristocratic. Not merely does there exist a temporal juxtaposition of political and ecclesiastical aristocracy; the union between the two forms is intimate and organic. Divine right, whether political or priestly, is vested in but few hands; physical and spiritual authority has in the past inevitably taken an aristocratic and hierarchical form, culminating in absolute monarchy dlike in state and church. ("Legitimists need a master to enable themselves to have servants," wrote Anzengruber.) Thomas Aquinas found arguments, not only in favour of inflicting the death penalty upon heretics, but also in proof that slavery was a natural institution, the Catholic Christian being in this matter perfectly at one with the pagan Aristotle.

The political and social aim of democracy is to abolish a relationship of subjection and rule. The derivative meaning of the term democracy is "people's rule." Modern democracy does not aim at rule at all, but at administration, at the administration of the people, by the people, for the people. How this new conception, this new estimate, of state organisation and social organisation can be carried out in practice, is no mere question of power; it is a difficult problem of administrative technique. Since the days of Rousseau, philosophers and statesmen have been concerned with the problem of direct and indirect government and administration.