ABSTRACT
Democracy in its essence is government which, by whatever means, is actually in accordance with the general will of the governed; and ideally this result might be realised by an ideal despot. One of the difficulties involved in the very plausible conception of democracy as government determined by the people alone, the word "people" being taken as meaning the units of the average mass. True democracy exists in proportion, and only in proportion, as the correspondence between the action of the delegates and the general will is complete. The fundamental difficulty does not lie in the fact that the present machinery for realising the general will is defective. It lies in the fact that any general will, which does or which can exist, is something widely different from Mr. Cecil Chesterton's own conception of it, and from that which all modern theories of pure democracy postulate.
