Friday, March 9, 2012

Democracy as an experiment......................Or, "You're as good as I am"

    "Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is.  Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins.  Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it.  For there is no trick in perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.  President Lincoln defined democracy to be 'the government of the people by the people for the people.'  This is a sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrangement.  Theodore Parker said that 'Democracy meant not 'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.' ' And this is the ethical composition of it, necessary as a complement of the other; a conception which, could it be made actual and practical, would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for answering wrongly.  In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed..."

-James Russell Lowell, excerpted from his essay, Democracy

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