than by two hundred rats of his own species, and one of his contemporaries
had warned that everything would be lost once the worker knew that he
had a mind. Illiteracy is no longer a reason for exclusion from the
franchise. Women were subordinated to men ever since the Greek
society and restricted to the home, possibly on the ground stated by one
poet, that women will be the last thing to be civilised by man. But as
they were drawn into the factory system, they developed a sense of
independence exemplified in the larger countries by a room of their own
and their own latchkey, They too have now been given the right to vote.
The abolition of slavery was immediately followed in the French West
Indies and in the Northern States of the United States by the grant of all
political rights, and especially the right of adult suffrage, to the slaves.
The French Republic took the view that it could not discriminate between
men on grounds of colour or race, that its slogan "liberty, equality,
fraternity" embraced all men, and that one group of Frenchmen could
not be regarded and treated as half or quarter citizens. The privilege
granted to the former slaves in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1848 was
extended to the British West Indies only after the people had exercised
the right of revolution which Locke and Jefferson had stressed-first
in 1944, when the Jamaica Constitution was reformed to permit adult
suffrage, followed in 1946 by Trinidad and Tobago.

 The grant of adult suffrage to the British West Indies means that
 the right to vote has now been extended to all people-whether' former
 slaves or former indentured immigrants, men and women, workers as
 well as capitalists, irrespective of their illiteracy or lack of education.
 To this extent, therefore, the British West Indies have, since 1944, been
 introduced into the democratic fold.

 The story, however, is completely different when it comes to the
 question of the development of the second cardinal feature of modem
 democracy, the growth of a popularly controlled legislature to which the
 executive is subordinate and responsible.

 The earliest form of democratic organisation and procedure was
 simplicity itself. The Greek city state, being small and with a limited
 number of citizens, selected its officers either by lot or by rotation ; either
 the names were put in a hat or each citizen took his turn at some office.
 The ideal was that each citizen should hold some office during his lifetime.
 As the community was remarkably homogeneous, without any marked
 difference in education or wealth, this was not a difficult system to operate.
 Much the same system still prevails in parts of Switzerland today. In
 other words, the Greeks developed a system of direct rather than repre-
 sentative democracy. But the representative system became inevitable
 with the growth of the nation state, large in size, with a huge population.
 In a country of some 100 million people like the United States, where
 it takes a week to drive from New York to California, direct democra-y
 is an absurdity.

 The system of representation, as begun in Europe about the thirteenth
 century, was based originally on the organisation of a Parliament advisory
 to the King consisting of representatives of the two principal classes or