THE FORUM FOR SEPTEMBER 1914 A BETTER THAN DEMOCRACY SYLVESTER BAXTER Tumultuously void of a clean scheme To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters. EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON SOCIETY of professional men had asked the writer to tell them something about Mexico. In the course of a very informal talk he remarked that the Mexicans were unfit for democracy and it was doubtful if they ever would be fit; but perhaps they might some time be fit for something better than democracy. Whereupon a unanimous gasp suggested incredulity, if nothing more. The circumstance that there was little time for elaborating upon a statement susceptible of no little qualification accounts in some measure for what follows here. On another occasion the writer was asked if he favored votes for women. He replied that he believed in less voting rather than more; indeed, suffrage, as at present exercised, seemed to him a most unsatisfactory instrument for the achievement of free self-government. This for the reason that, while all persons who actually know their business can be depended upon to look after it, the prevailing misconception of democracy makes it every man's business to concern himself with matters as to which, as a rule, he knows little or nothing. Some of the writer's radical friends regard him as ultraconservative; some of his conservative friends deem him unduly radical. In truth he believes in holding fast to the good that has been achieved while pressing confidently onward to realize the larger good that must come with the shaping of better implements for dealing with new conditions. He would not cling to things outworn because once serviceable; neither would he cut and slash at everything in sight with the first new edged tool that comes into unskilled hands. Furthermore, he earnestly holds to equality among men and women as to the rights, privileges and duties inherent to a common humanity; he has no sympathy with social, political or religious prejudices of any sort, whether based upon differences in class, race or other distinctions. So perhaps he is both conservative and radical. Somehow the glib saying that "the remedy for the ills of democracy is more democracy" suggests the charlatan who declared that the remedy for fits was more fits. But put just a little differently it all becomes clear and true: The remedy for the ills of democracy is a better democracy. Not the sort of democracy which to-day is getting all the world into trouble and menaces civilization; whose symptoms have become as acute in China, in Persia, in India, in Turkey, as in our distinctively western world; which has transformed Mexico from a land kept in order by despotism for nearly a generation into almost hopeless anarchy-a forecast of Russia's fate; not that sort of democracy which incites Cuba to go the way of Haiti. And as to our own nation, after accomplishing wonders for orderly progress in the Philippines, just as in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, and at Panama -by keeping affairs out of the hands of incompetent politicians and acting directly for administrative efficiency-the same illusion has brought us to the verge of deliberately casting our wards adrift to go the inevitable way of Mexico. Furthermore, we ourselves are, strand by strand, now severing the ancient moorings that from the beginning have held secure our ship of state and are splicing in new cables whose untested fibres are twisted from every political nostrum that may suit the popular whim of the moment. It is true that the old moorings are outworn; made for conditions now obsolete, their replacement is called for. They have held us well to ground where we have waxed great in the ways of freedom and enlightenment. But administrative machinery devised for the days of handicraft, of animal traction, of the sailing-packet, is simple in comparison with the complex requirements of an era of power-production, of railways, electric transmission, motor-vehicles; an age that finds in the air a superior ocean, navigable as the waters. To meet these radically altered conditions, progressive changes more radical and revolutionary than anything hitherto conceived are inevitable. Yet these changes cannot be made untested, or heedless of precedent, without peril of economic and social disaster. Science and discovery are the main factors in the world's wonderful advance. Man is more and more achieving the creative faculties that mark his essential divinity. The vast fund of human knowledge already accumulated can be but a tiny fraction of what coming centuries must bring out of a wise application of the learning we have gained. Yet we still keep ignorance at the helm. The proverbial marvel at the little wisdom. with which the world is governed did not relate to the non-political ordering of its affairs. But in the affairs of supreme control we are even now running the world according to the discredited usages and standards, the obsolete procedures, the short-sighted aims, of the ages when individual and national covetousness supplied the paramount motives. Yet the potential abundance of the new era, with its limitless possibilities for production, leaves no rational ground for coveting things that should be had almost for the asking. In fact, the attempt to run the world's affairs of to-day according to those old-time standards is as fatuous as it would be to seek to regulate the mighty motive powers of to-day with the governing mechanisms of the primitive steam engine. Modern machinery thus regulated would straightway "run wild." Is not an analogous regulation, applied to the complex affairs of the modern state, the fundamental |