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THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY PARTV THE PRINCIPLES oF JusTICE: CITIZENSHIP AND SuFFRAGE (Continued) W E have now sufficiently clarified the basic terms of our analy~is, a~d indicated th~ difficulties and problems whiCh he ahead of us m our effort to demonstrate that the Democratic constitution is a thoroughly practicable ideal, "3-S well as perfectly just. But before .we begin the actual steps of that demonstration, it will be helpful to consider the similarities and differences between modern and ancient Republican governments, comparing them not only with respect to the principle of constitutionality which they embody, but also with respect to the problem of suffrage and the extension of the franchise. The Democratic constitution has come into actual existence only in the last century, and its emergence has occurred by the gradual amendment of already existing constitutions which were essentially Republican. It may be enlightening, therefore , to observe the generation of Democracy as a form of government. Though all of political history has been tending toward this event, its intelligibility is increased by examining the proximate causes which worked to produce it. We ,must consider, therefore, the first steps toward the Democratic constitution in the actual motions of modern political life, and the first anticipations of the theory of Democracy in modern political philosophy-the expression of those crucial insights which reached full articulation only in the very recent past. We turn to this at once in Section 2. 2. An accurate account and a fair estimate of the political achievements which took place in certain European countries 80 THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 81 and in the New World at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, requires the historian of these events to view them partly as revolutionary and partly as evolutio1;1ary. To take either point of view exclusively distorts the picture. The novelties in the. foreground must not be allowed to overshadow or completely blot out the long historical perspectives, nor must the background loom so large that the outlines of the modern departure dwindle to insignificance. What is happening for the first time in these centuries is not the establishment of purely Constitutional government. That existed and thrived in the ancient communities of the Mediterranean world-in Greece and Carthage and Rome. The development of.·such government in England from 1688 on, and the foundation somewhat later of such government in France and in America, were revolutionary steps only in their overthrow of despotism. But, at the same time, we must not minimize the novelty of the modern Republics. To appreciate their contribution, it is not enough to see them as an evolution from the imperfect constitutionality of typically mediaeval government-the regimen regale et politic'lf,m. They do not represent merely a recovery of ancient political institutions which had been lost, or rather modified to suit the feudal conditions of the Middle Ages. As measured by the principle of constitutionality itself, the modern departures may not add anything essentially new, but they do give this principle new embodiments which exhibit its radical character more plainly and realize its political significance more fully than anything known to the ancient world. Largely because the modern innovators had experienced the defects of mediaeval constitutionalism, observing how easily a regimen regale et politicum could degenerate into despotism, and how inevitably it tended to do so because of the presumption of kings, arrogating undue power to themselves, the men who formed and wrote the modern constitutions exercised great prudence and political ingenuity in making sure that the constitution would be as effective as positive law should 6 82 M. J. ADLER AND WALTER FARRELL be-binding rulers and protecting the ruled by enforceable sanctions.584 We have spoken of the "modern innovators." We do not have in mind the great political writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-the men whose treatises deserve a place in the history of political theory-but rather the great actors on the stage of political life, the men who framed constitutions, who debated their provisions, and who argued for their adoption . Most of them, of course, were writers also, who in their pamphlets and papers, largely oratorical in...

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