The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote has (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined to nations of European origin.

But there is nothing in the form or history of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government.

Nor can he draw any intelligible and consistent conclusion from the practice of democratic States in giving or refusing the vote to their non-European subjects.

The United States, for instance, have silently and almost unanimously dropped the experiment of negro suffrage.

In that case, owing to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African negro and the white man from North-West Europe, the problem was comparatively simple; but no serious attempt has yet been made at a new solution of it, and the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing with the more subtle racial questions created by the immigration of Chinese and Japanese and Slavs, or by the government of the mixed populations in the Philippines.
England and her colonies show a like uncertainty in the presence of the political questions raised both by the migration of non-white races and by the acquisition of tropical dependencies.