"I didn't get it out of books either--unless you count the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe,' which are the only two I ever read as a boy.

But the way I worked it out at last was that democracy, like life, isn't anything that's already finished.

It is raw stuff.

We are making it every minute of the time; and it depends on us whether we put it through as a straight job or a failure.

Democracy, as I see it, isn't a word or a phrase out of a book, or a formula, or anything that has frozen into a fixed shape or pattern.
It is warm and fluid, and it is teeming with living forms.