Democracy Author:James Hervey Hyslop Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER H THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM We have said that we cannot return to monarchy and that we cannot stop with our present democratic methods. The re... more »ason is the same in both cases. The machinery of government in both a monarchy and our present system is too simple to meet the responsibilities of a highly complex civilisation. We must therefore reconstruct our methods to suit the existing conditions and their demands. But such a task requires us to deal with the whole theory of government, and it is one of great magnitude, as the history of theoretical politics abundantly proves. It will not be my purpose, however, to treat the subject with that detail which is the custom with political students, but to discuss the most general principles which determine government of any kind and its forms. Politics have a philosophic basis, or are intimately connected with the general ideas that are the subject of philosophic reflection, and hence are amenable to courts of philosophic jurisdiction. As a consequence of this fact it will be important to survey the general ideas and moral forces that predetermine the movement of both theoretical and practical politics. In this way we may discover some clue to the kind of political reforms that the present situation demands. If we look at history and philosophy we shall find that the discussion of theoretical politics always turns about the problems and conceptions of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, or the rule of the one, the few, and the many. This is the division adopted by Aristotle and perpetuated in philosophy ever since. Oligarchy was made convertible by him with aristocracy, though the literal interpretation of the term might not suggest that conception. Associated conceptions, besides that of mere number in the other two f...« less