The word Democracy is commonly used to denote the polity in contemporary Europe which is informed by the Revolutionary dogma
This Democracy has very little in common with the democracies of pre-Christian Europe or of the Middle Ages
Ancient and medieval democracies were the result of fierce struggles, and of the triumph of the most highly endowed races; they rested upon a basis of fact, and were, even in their most popular form, essentially aristocratic; citizenship in them being regarded not as a natural right but as a hardly won privilege
The Revolutionary Democracy of the present day, on the other hand, starts with the proposition that man, quà man, possesses all the highest attributes of citizenship, and is based on Rousseau's theory of the abstract rights, innate, inalienable, and imprescriptible, of humanity in an imaginary state of nature
Its issue cannot be doubtful; the doctrines of absolute political equality, and of the supreme right of the numerical majority-relatively poor-must issue in Socialism