Democracy
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Democracy. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a government by the people. It is not a primitive form of government. Savage tribes are governed usually by a chief, sheik, or other leader. The earliest approach to a pure democracy is the town meeting in which each has a voice in the adoption of regulations and the election of officers. Democracy is entirely opposed to the idea of leading families, inherited dignities, and permanent officeholders. As communities grow larger and expand into commonwealths, it is impossible for all the voters to get together. Some one has said that a pure democracy must be able to gather within hearing of a single voice. When the number of voters becomes too large for such an assembly it is necessary to elect representatives to perform the actual work of making laws. In the farming regions of the United States local matters are still managed in a democratic way; but in city, state, and national affairs, business is transacted by representatives who are for their term of office out of reach of the people. Speaking of the United States, President Eliot of Harvard, says: After observing the facts of a full century, one may therefore say of the American democracy that it has contracted public debt with moderation, paid it with unexampled promptness, acquired as good a public credit as the world has ever known, made private property secure, and shown no tendency to attach riches or to subsidize poverty, or in either direction to violate the fundamental principle of democracy that all men are equal before the law.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
that form of government in which the sovereign power is in the hands of the people collectively, and is exercised by them either directly or indirectly through elected representatives or delegates. The third book of Herodotus describes it as it existed in ancient Greece, the first country perhaps where it was ever allowed scope for development. Aristotle also treated of the subject.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote in 1910 that democracy means "government by the people," the American people who could vote were overwhelmingly white men: women were barred nationally until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, US senators were still chosen by state legislatures until 1913, and Southern black voters were locked out by poll taxes and literacy tests until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both entries also treat democracy as a rare thing found chiefly in Greece, Britain and the United States; the twentieth century saw it nearly extinguished in Europe by fascism in the 1930s, then spread by decolonization and the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91 until most of the world's states held competitive elections. The 1910 worry that representatives are "for their term of office out of reach of the people" is one thing that has not dated at all, and since the 2000s researchers have tracked a broad slide back toward authoritarian rule. President Eliot's boast that American democracy showed "no tendency to attack riches or to subsidize poverty" was overtaken within a generation by the federal income tax of 1913 and the New Deal.
Written for this edition, 2026.