ABSTRACT
Various forms of representative government have been tried; those of the United States, and that of Britain, are the most nearly successful—despite certain grave evidences of social decadence near the end of the twentieth century. Representative government on a scale as vast as the United States of America never had been conceived of before. To the Parliament at Westminster had come only members from England, Scotland, and Wales; Ireland then had its own parliament at Dublin. In the city-states of the Hellenic and the Roman epochs, a free government was one in which the citizens—or at least the principal men among them—could assemble in a forum, debate public concerns, and vote as individuals. Only a dozen years after the first permanent English settlement was founded in Virginia, the colony's governor summoned a representative assembly, made up of twenty-two burgesses from eleven settlements; they met in the church at Jamestown.
