This universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limited
forms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the fact
that nothing enters into it except man as such. The rival powers which
seek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a pure
democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has its
claim as the custodian of education and property and the advantages
flowing from their long possession; the trained mind, the accumulated
capital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most
intense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and would
appropriate to themselves in the structure of government a
representation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds. If
it be still allowed that all men should have a share in a
self-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, in
addition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants of
such men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity,
a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these three things, education,
property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities in
human conditions which democracy would minimize.
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