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Bookplate inserted; bookseller stamp for The Book Lovers’ Book Store & Library, Perth inside cover; signed in pencil on front endpaper: “R. G. Menzies”; various highlights made with pencil in margin throughout text, including: “Responsibility, and not solely privilege. The penalty of our great advances in ‘social services’ has been that too much emphasis has been laid on the claim of the individual on the community and too little on his own duty and power of contribution to it […] The insistence on privilege without responsibility has undoubtedly been, in or generation, a weakness which has made it easy for false prophets to pour scorn on the ‘flabbiness’ of democracies and to issue ringing appeals to youth to choose the harder but more heroic way of service and sacrifice […] Democracy, to be healthy, must offer not only rewards, but tasks.” [pp. 19-20]; “[The sense of responsibility in British society has not been confined to the political sphere. No element in it has been more salutary than the amount and variety of voluntary service which has been given in every kind of social activity. It is unparalleled in the world. Not the least part of it has come from the so-called ‘leisured’ class which it is not the fashion to regard (so far as it survives) as an excrescence of drones and parasites.] There is a real danger, in many of the plans which are now put forward, that much if not all of this unrewarded service may pass into the hands, in the name of ‘organization’, of Government officials. If this ever comes to pass, not only will democratic life suffer a grave decline of that very ‘efficiency’ which regimentation is intended to promote, but something vital will have gone out of the spirit of citizenship in this nation – an indispensable ingredient, as I believe, in the social cement of our particular kind of democracy.” [p. 20]; “All modern democracies therefore depend on representation based upon a wide franchise, and the expedient of the referendum has not proved successful except in small, compact communities; while the Dictators have repeatedly shown that the plebiscite, masquerading as the General Will, can, by cynical machination, be the very negation of democracy.” [p.21]; “A serious practical difficulty in modern communities is the age of representative and his means of livelihood. In youth and middle age most men are establishing their position in life and can afford neither the time [nor the energy of Parliamentary duties and for all the anxieties and exertions of elections].” [pp. 22 – 23]; “It is impossible to say that since the final stage was reached [towards universal suffrage] the prestige of Parliament has increased or that it has become more truly representative of the will of the nation than it was fifty years ago.” [p. 24]; “As an exhibition of democratic methods, a general election in England, or a Presidential election in the United States, is a depressing spectacle.” [p. 25]; “Since politics is ‘the art of the possible’” [p. 33]; “[The representative is always in the difficulty that if he is too far in advance of public opinion, and if he administers too many shocks, he may lose all further opportunities of ‘educating’ his public, for the excellent reason that his public will throw him out of office. It may be heroic to become a voice crying in the wilderness, but it is not practically effective. It is not, therefore, always mere cowardice which prevents the politician from announcing, in blunt terms, what he really believes if he knows that it will be unpopular; he often has to consider how he can lead public opinion without letting it become aware that it is being led.] The process is not only exceedingly delicate, but often painfully slow, and to a statesman of strong judgement it must often tax patience almost beyond endurance. In modern times there is no more remarkable example of it than Mr Roosevelt’s handling of public opinion before America’s entry into the war.” [pp. 35 – 36];  “the common sense of democracy dislikes making martyrs of mere ranters.” [pp. 56 – 57]; “In the United States, on the other hand, there are, I believe, some seven hundred transmitting stations. The air is never silent, and many Americans are so accustomed to the disembodied voice at all hours of day and night, and in every place, from the bath to the automobile, that they feel lost without it, and for them the silence of the grave will add to the terrors of death.” [p. 63]; “[I]f the radio is to be admitted at all as a medium of discussion, it is difficult to justify a State monopoly. Freedom of speech should apply as well to the mechanical voice as to the natural voice.” [p. 64]; “Of recent years ingenious persons have devised means of ascertaining or predicting opinion by polls, ballots, and ‘cross-sections’ […] I suppose there is no objection to them in a free country; but if they influence the actions of politicians, as they appear to do, I confess I regard them with apprehension as factors in democratic life.” [p. 65]; “A far greater danger in the modern state has been the constant tendency to place the executive above the law.” [p. 70]; “There is no unit of existence except the individual, and for him, and by him and through him, all systems of government exist.” [p. 77]; “It is, indeed, one of the problems of civilization that nothing which peace has yet devised can quite replace the incomparable stimulus of the life-and-death contest, and, until it has done so, it seems only too probably that man, being an animal, will continue to turn, even against his will, to this supreme test of animal vitality.” [pp. 78 – 79]; “Every creature, then, should enjoy the maximum of liberty; but to say that is merely to pose a conundrum, since the eternal problem of all government is, what is the due proportion between the liberty of each individual and the liberty of all? How can one man enjoy freedom without subtracting from the freedom of another, and how much should each surrender to the other in order to create the Greatest Common Measure for the totality.” [p. 80]; [concerning a hypothetical emergency regulation for making it a criminal offence to sell a stick of rhubarb with more than a specified amount of leaf in order to protect the purchaser] “Any housewife in possession of her faculties would say: “I will not pay the price of rhubarb for rhubarb-lead, and I am going next door where the greengrocer will give me honest dealing.” Unless we are to imagine, as I hope we do not, a vast and nation-wide conspiracy among greengrocers, the natural laws of competition, not to mention the decent honest of the average trader, will look after a matter of this kind. Let anybody study the Departmental definition of a Grade I egg or a seedling onion and ask himself what the condition of daily dealing would be if these ‘controls’ were exercised in peace-time, as many doctrinaires hope that they will be and some deliberately design that they shall be. The democratic State, is not, as the Almighty Himself once described, a procurator fatuorum.” [p. 96]. Book also inscribed in pencil on back endpaper: “K.L.M. 4874, M.H.M. 1477”.