True and False Democracy. By Nicholas Murray Butler. (Mac- millan
and Co. 4s. 6d. net.)—This is a collection of addresses delivered to educated audiences in the United States. The lessons which they are intended to teach are applicable with but little modification to ourselves. In America we see not a few things which we should do well to heed "writ large." " Congress has invaded," says Mr. Butler (he is President of Columbia Uni-
versity), "the province of the President and is being urged to invade the prerogatives of the judiciary." Make no great change, and we can apply the dictum to the House of Commons. An Assembly elected to maintain Free-trade is called upon to do things which are wholly outside that sphere, and
some of which are directly or indirectly hostile to the principle. Here, again, is something for the Socialists. It applies, in the first place, to the States, but secondly, nee long° interval°, to Britain;—
"If the exaggerated forms of exploitation which are now observed among us are studied with care, it will be seen that, almost without exception, they spring from community-given monopoly or privilege. They do not spring from the relation between individual and individual, or from the institution of private property itself. They spring from the relations between individual and community. Those relations would be multiplied, not diminished, in a Socialistic democracy. The only hope for the abolition of exploitation in a Socialistic democracy, therefore, is the regeneration of man and the removal of those natural obstacles to human perfection which are so plainly in evidence. In other words, the Socialistic democracy assumes, and must assume, for the success of its programme, a condition of individual perfection which tho whol.m of history denies."
And here, once more, are words which are applicable to other Assemblies besides the American Congress. They aro quoted from an article written by James Madison in the Federalist :— "An Assembly which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength : which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes." " It is against the enterprising ambition of this department," he proceeds, " that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions." This is a book full of sound sense from beginning to end.
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