The history of democracy's progress in a mid-Western city—so, to introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must call it. Yet in using the word democracy, one must plead for a distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in upon words newly put in use 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 and our use of the commonest religious terms like faith, grace, salvation, for instance. Their connotation, originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has become concrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in our common speech, even above the catchpenny vocabulary of the demagogue or politician, the word democracy has taken on the limited, partial and ignoble connotation of more or less incidental and provisional forms of democracy's practical outcome; or even of by-products not directly traceable to the 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
