ABSTRACT
What is Art? What is Democracy? Have they ever existed together? Have we reason to assume, by recourse to history—from the facts of past and present—that they will;—that there will ever be a democratic art, the free expression of a free people? Egypt and Assyria are not encouraging, with their august monuments and their slavery. Nor for a modern instance, is Switzerland, the most complete of democracies, producing little art beyond cuckoo clocks and carved toys. Let us try to take a rapid glance at the great epochs of art and the countries which produced it and consider their relative degrees of democratic achievement.
