down the centuries. You may catch sounds of it in Chaucer, a fuller music of it in Langland; and thenceforward, to Morris, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and our soldier authors of to-day, there is scarcely a poet of any significance who does not more or less preach that simple gospel of humanity. Nor are these apostles of democracy to be set aside as discontented plebeians. The courtly Gascoigne, passionately denouncing social wrongs and inequalities and urging the duty of man to his fellows—
O Knights, O Squires, O Gentle bloods yborn,
You were not born all only for yourselves—
was as fine a democrat in the sixteenth century as Shelley was in the nineteenth. There are as true and trenchant things said for democracy in Sir Thomas More's Utopia as in the books of such moderns as Ruskin, Dickens, Carlyle, Wells, Shaw; and it is no stranger that our people should have risen spontaneously now for the democratic ideal of freedom that is so literally in their blood, than that they
