Under universal suffrage, the masses do not decide, their role consists in supporting the decision of one minority or other. Such programmes were, in fact, programmes of collective life. In them the masses were invited to accept a fine of decision. To-day something very different is happening. The phenomenon is an extraordinarily strange one.
Public authority is in the hands of a representative of the masses.
These are so powerful that they have wiped out all opposition. They are in possession of power in such an unassailable manner that it would be difficult to find in history examples of a Government so all-powerful as these are. In short, it lives without any vital programme, any plan of existence. It does not know where it is going, because, strictly speaking, it his no fixed road, no predetermined trajectory before it. When such a public authority attempts to justify itself it makes no reference at all to the future.