The St. Johns herald., 1893-03-23
Is 1t UHdemOcratiC to Increase the
 Powers of Government

A subscriber writing us in regard to the petition for Government own ershIp of the telegraph and tele- phone says: "The only objection to Government control is that 1t tends to increase the powers of the Gov ernment, which is undemocratic. " Here seems to be a confusion of terms, growing evidently out of a confusion of thought Looking up the definition of democracy as given by Webster, we find it to be "Gov- ernment by the people-a form of government in which the supreme power is in the hands of the peo- ple." According to this definition, the correctness of which will not be questioned, any policy tending to enlarge the powers of the people in government is democratic, and any policy tending to restrict the power of the people is undemocratlc. Is then the proposition of government ownership of the telegraph a meas ure for restricting or enlarging the powers of the people in gover~- ment? Very obviously it is a prop osition for enlarging the powers of the people by placing them in direct control of the facilities of commun- icatIon. What, then, in the name of common sense, does our core spondent mean by calling the prop osition "undemocratic"?
 We might leave the matter here, but it may be profitable in a spirit of candor to seek after the expla- nation of the certainly very com plete misunderstanding of terms into which our correspondent has fallen. Obviously it arises from q loose and indefinite use of the word government. There are two con- trasted kinds of government which are as opposite as light and dark
 ness, and everything that is true of one kind of government is false as regards the other. The one sort is the government of men by other men, and the other is self-govern- ment. The one is royal, imperial, nristocratic, the other is republican, democratic, popular. To increase the powers of monarchical govern ments Is uHdemocratic because it encroaches in so far on the power of the people. To increase the pow CT of democratic government, on the other hand, is necessarily and always, by the very meaning of the terms, democratic policy.
 When Thomas Jefferson said "the government which governs least is best" he necessarily had in mind the only forms of government of which the world at that date had had any experience, namely, the royal and aristocratic forms, and as applied to them the saying was quite true. It requires no argument to prove that the less men are tyran- ized over by selfish despots the bet ter. When, however, the people | govern themselves for their own in- terests, to say the less governing they do the better, is equivalent to declaring that the less attention people give to their own affairs the more prosperous they will be.
 We beg our correspondent and all | other good people who have allowed i their minds to be fuddled by the misuse of this maxim about gov ernment, to bear in mind that the question is not whether they shall | be more or less governed but who shall do the governing, for they have got to be governed by some body anyhow. The economic sys- tem'of country, commercial and | industrial, upon which we all de- pend tenfold more completely than upon the sO-called political govern ment, is complex and elaborate system which requires a deal of governing. It has got to be gov erned by somebody, and will be governed in the interest of those !