Timely Topics (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from Timely Topics

Thirty years ago, Professor Fiske published a volume under the title - "The Critical Period in American History." If, at that date, the conditions were critical what shall be said of the America of to-day, at the close of the World War! It is the world as a whole that has arrived at the most critical era in its history. So momentous have been the evolutions and revolutions of the last decade that they are nothing less than dramatic and that on the side of tragedy. History has become histrionic.

To examine these pending and confusing issues in a judicial and dispassionate temper demands the wisdom of the wisest. The world is at its crisis and the crisis must be met. Two or three fundamental considerations may be cited:

I

The Democratic Instinct

The word, democratic, is here used in its etymological and generally accepted sense, of the rule of the people. Among the "inalienable rights" with which men as men are endowed, liberty is an indispensable one and never can be safely surrendered. It is, indeed, more than an endowment. It is an instinct in peoples of all eras and races and from the dawn of history has insisted upon its presence and expression. Whatever may be said of the divine right of kings, the divine right of peoples is a prior one to which the assumptions of kings must give way as they are now doing, perforce, the civilized world over. Herein, lies the origin of what by various names we call, Representative Government "of and by and for the people," what Maine, in his suggestive work calls, "Popular Government," what Mr. Bryce calls, "The Commonwealth," where the ultimate object of government is the common weal. At times it is known as Parliamentary Government.

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