Doubtless the folk-moot of the tribe was democratic, for all free men attended it, and the English were a nation of freeholders, and the slaves were few--except in the west--and might become free men.[1] The shire-moot, too, with its delegates from the hundred-moots, was equally democratic.

But with feudalism and the welding of the nation, tribal democracies passed away, leaving, however, in many places a valuable tradition of local self-government.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY A steady and invincible belief that those who maintain the defence of the country and pay for the cost of government should have a voice in the great council of the nation, and the conviction that effective utterance can be found for that voice in duly chosen representatives, are the foundations on which democracy has built.

Democracy itself comes in (1) when it is seen that all are being taxed for national purposes; and (2) the opinion finds acceptance that responsibilities of citizenship should be borne by all who have reached the age of manhood and are of sound mind.
To sketch the rise of democracy in England is to trace the steady resistance to kings who would govern without the advice of counsellors, and to note the growing determination that these counsellors must be elected representatives.

Only when the absolutism of the Crown is ended and a Parliament of elected members has become the real centre of government, is it possible, without a revolution, for democracy to be established.
Much of this book is given up, then, to the old stories of kingly rule checked and slowly superseded by aristocracy.

And all the old attempts at revolution by popular insurrection are again retold, not only because of the witness they bear to the impossibility in England of achieving democracy by the violent overthrow of government, but because they also bear witness to the heroic resolution of the English people to take up arms and plunge into a sea of troubles rather than bear patiently ills that were unseemly for men to endure in silence.