“credit system”) in men and institutions rather than in the intrinsic value of
paper money or checks, violent revolutions do not so much redistribute
wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural
inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and
privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same
instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of
the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is
individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
In strict usage of the term, democracy has existed only in modern times,
for the most part since the French Revolution. As male adult suffrage in the
United States it began under Andrew Jackson [1767-1845]; as adult
suffrage it began in our youth. In ancient Attica, out of a total population of
315,000 souls, 115,000 were slaves, and only 43,000 were citizens with the
right to vote.
Women, nearly all workingmen, nearly all shopkeepers
and tradesmen, and all resident aliens were excluded from the franchise.
The citizen minority was divided into two factions: the oligarchic–chiefly
the landed aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie; and the democratic–small
landowners and small businessmen, and citizens who had lapsed into wage
labor but still retained the franchise. During the ascendancy of Pericles
(460-430 B.C.) [Pericles (495?-429 B.C.)] the aristocracy prevailed, and
Athens had her supreme age in literature, drama, and art. After his death,
and the disgrace of the aristocracy through the defeat of Athens in the
Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), the demos, or lower class of citizens,
rose to power, much to the disgust of Socrates and Plato. From Solon to the
Roman conquest of Greece (146 B.C.) the conflict of oligarchs and
democrats was waged with books, plays, orations, votes, ostracism,
assassination, and civil war. At Corcyra (now Corfu), in 427 B.C., the riling
oligarchy assassinated sixty leaders of the popular party; the democrats
overturned the oligarchs, tried fifty of them before a kind of Committee of
Public Safety, executed all fifty, and starved hundreds of aristocratic
