An address of the utmost interest was delivered by Judge Lobingi.: to the Quest Society on Monday. Dr. H. Chatley was in the chair, and the subject chosen ey Judge Lobingier was "What is Democracy If we are actually to measure the achievements of democracy, his Honour said, we must not be misled by forms; we must probe deep for realities. It is not enough that a government may call itself "republican" or "democratic"; or that it, has a written constitution, president and a legislature. It might have all of these and still be an odious despotism. Who will say that Britain is less ''democratic'? than Bolshevik Russia or that Norway, even with her king, is not more of a democracy than Nicaragua?
Misconcerrios or Democracy.
That keen inconoclast, W. H. Mallock, declares "All current definitions -of democracy err, even before they have been formulated, in a false assumption - which precedes their formulation. They all assume that democracy vated of government, This is precisely what, except i minute and primitive communities, democracy is not, never has been, and never can be. It is not, and never can be, a system of government all. It is simply one element or Principle out of two, the other being the principle of oligarchy, which two may indeed be combined in very various proportions, but neither of which alone will produce representative government, any more than saltpetre or charcoal by itself will constitute gunpowder.'
Another common misconception of democracy is thus described by the poet Lowell "It. ig supposed" he says "to reduce all mankind te a dead level ct mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life and therefore their code of morals, manners and conduct—to endanger the—rights of property and possession, Dealing with this point Judge Lobingier expressed the opinion that the misconception was largely due to misuse of the term "equality," and quoted well-known writers in support of his contention, In its origin the conception of "equality?" was a legal conception and it had been carried forward into the Anglo-American legal system where it found expression in the maxim "Equality is equity." So the motto of one of the American _Commonwealths (Nebraska) was "Equality before the law." And such, it seemed, was the significance attached the term "equality" at the time,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.