When you start making an illiterate farmer into a Chinese citizen, you have to begin by telling him that he does not know what democracy means, when he says that he would rather live under an autocracy than a republic. You have to make it clear to him that he has never lived under a democratic government, that what he has mistaken for the mani-testations of democracy have been simply the manifestations of official license exercised by officials ree ponsible to nothing above them and nothing under them. He will appreciate that only the exceptional man, placed in a position where he can commit any crime with impunity, will remain guiltless. You can explain that in a democracy worthy of the name an official cannot commit any crime with impunity and then reveal the rather startling fact that officials in a democracy are not so much responsible to those over them as to those under them, that the official is not so much a ruler on behalf of the few, as a servant executing the will of the many. They are like managers of companies, employed to transact the business of the company and keep its accounts but always responsible to the shareholders in the company, It is then easy to make it clear that in democratic communities where the people take as much interest in their government as the shareholders take in the management of a company, their officials will assume much the same attitude towards the people as the company manager does towards the shareholders; that in such a community the people, will seo that the taxes they pay come back to them in service, in public works, educational facilities and in the maintenance of order; and that it is to such a system that China is pledge ed before the world and to such a system that she will arrive whenever public opinion forces it upon officialdom and not before.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.