FORTY YEARS OF IT
BY RALPH HENRY BARBOUR.
D. APPLETON & COMPANY, NEW YORK.
FORTY
YEARS OF IT
BY
BRAND WHITLOCK
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXIV
Copyright, 1914, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1913, by The Phillips Publishing Company
Printed in the United States of America
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
ELIAS D. WHITLOCK
WHO DIED DECEMBER 23, 1913
A MINISTER OF THE SANCTUARY, AND
OF THE TRUE TABERNACLE, WHICH
THE LORD PITCHED, AND NOT MAN
INTRODUCTION
The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Westerncity—so, to introduce this book in specificterms, one perhaps inevitably must call it. Yet inusing the word democracy, one must plead for a distinction,or, better, a reversion, indicated by thecurious anchylosis that, at a certain point in theirmaturity, usually sets in upon words newly put inuse to express some august and large spiritual reality.We all know how this materializing tendency,if one may call it that, has affected our notion andour use of the commonest religious terms like faith,grace, salvation, for instance. Their connotation,originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has becomeconcrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in ourcommon speech, even above the catchpenny vocabularyof the demagogue or politician, the word democracyhas taken on the limited, partial and ignobleconnotation of more or less incidental andprovisional forms of democracy’s practical outcome;or even of by-products not directly traceable tothe action of democracy itself. How often, for example,do we see direct primaries, the single tax,the initiative and referendum posed in a kind of[viii]...