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 III Modern Democracy Every one to count for one and no one for more than one. — Bentham. Everybody knows more than anybody. — Lincoln. WITH the fall of Greco-Roman democracy, the second reign of Demos was at an end. That came nearly two thousand years ago. Then followed a long interregnum before the third democratic struggle, that of our day, began. For it was only a little more than a century ago that the conflict was renewed. 1. The Rise of Modern Democracy To trace the rise of this movement in the modern world is not our main purpose, but a few of the great steps should be noted. From antiquity the medieval philosophers brought over the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Roman jurists. They pondered well the political ideas contained therein, and passed them on to succeeding generations of thinkers. Sometimes they boldly advocated them, as did Arnold of Brescia of the twelfth century, who was the first this side of antiquity apparently to proclaim popular sovereignty to be right. But ideas of any sort were not easily popularized then, and democratic notions did not become common. In fact, the social capacity of the masses of Europe was not sufficiently developed to receive them. It took the Renaissance and the Reformation to awaken and individualize the many and make them socially self-conscious before ideas of social revolution could work with much headway. To be sure, in England Magna Charta had been wrested from King John, but that wasprobably the work of the nobles in the interest of the few, and not a popular idea or movement. The first hint of democratic notions being common was in the Peasants' War of the sixteenth century, when equality of wealth and conditions was generally talked of. The fascinating doctrines of natural law were...