ABSTRACT
The officials of a trade union, who order a strike or prohibit it, may be oligarchs just as truly as a senate of hereditary peers, or any elected chamber packed with aristocratic landlords. Oligarchs need not be men distinguished by wealth or station, or by any of the advantages possible for a small class only. If there were a hundred men who could think and could understand language, but who could themselves neither utter a word nor read it, one man who could speak would necessarily rule the rest. Only through him, who interpreted each to all, would any concerted action on the part of the rest be possible. The logic of pure democracy, if applied in the way indicated, would make a clean sweep of all the methods and institutions with which democratic action has thus far been identified.
