In the evolution of democracy in America two large processes were to be worked out-the utilization of the resources of nature and the organization of civil affairs by means of a government adapted to such a country as ours. The industrial process has been co-ordinated with the civil, and democracy in America is the result. In Europe, since the heraldic summons of the Reformation, which came hard after the Columbian voyages, and in America, with the coming of the seventeenth century, the principles of government have shown a democratic application. It might be expected that Europe would anticipate America; that in the deep mine of Indo-European experience there should be worked out some of the principles of civil society as defined more clearly by modern tests; it might be expected that the toiler in the mine might miss the principles, though contributing by his labor to their definition in a later state of society, organized on an industrial and civil basis such as has been built upon in America. The thought of More, of Milton, and of Locke, of Montesquieu and of Penn, generalized upon the labor done in that mine, and grew into political systems, which, though differing from one another as widely as their authors, agree in placing a free man at the centre. It was too soon to find in any political system that modern correlative-free labor. The contradiction was sophistically avoided by denying manhood to the slave. The slave was a beast of burden. But there are those who consider the end. It is the function of the political philosopher, in the social economy, to anticipate results. Thought outruns performance. So Montesquieu anticipates the democracy of to-day, Hume anticipates the French Revolution, and Franklin the modern age of administration in government. Franklin finds the theory of the state made up, and devotes himself to the next problem-its administration. At times, from the close of the seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth century, the theory of the state was set forth, and the definition, modified by another century's experience, remains in the dictionary of politics essentially unchanged. It was made by successive processes in the evolution of democracy. Its elements are the individual, and that aggregate of individuals which we call the community or state. The Foundations of Democracy The history of that definition is a chapter in the history of the evolution of democracy. Rome evolved the idea of a legal body called a corporation; itself a fiction, but a useful legal convention. This legal fiction was the chief discovery in government for twelve hundred years. It was a legal device capable of a various civil application. While it was reaching perfection in southern Europe among the Greco-Latin peoples, the Teutonic peoples in northern Europe were yet uncivilized. Communal and individual interests were at war in all that region north of the Roman world. Communal interests were there subordinate to individual. Between the Roman and the Teuton was the Celt, who adjusted himself to the military form of the Roman state and laid the foundations of feudalism. He divided the land into counties, and rudely began that communal organization which has survived in our local and county government. It was the Celt who first applied the Roman military idea in local government. It was the Celt who first applied the administrative principles in the modern state, and his experience, chiefly military, bred in him slight respect for the form of government. Hence in the Celtic political economy arose a system of administrative law. A king is as dear to him by any other name, but he prefers the other name. His idea of the administration of government is military: the citizen is first a soldier. The rude and individualistic Teuton saw in the Roman corporation not merely a legal fiction, but a civil |