Tuesday, July 8: "Democracy," in G. K. Chesterton's careful definition, means "government by the uneducated. Whereas aristocracy," he went on, "means government by the badly educated." In Chesterton's day it was still a point of debate whether the lower orders ought properly to be allowed to vote. The great centuries-old exercise in passing power down, first from the monarch to the nobility, then from the nobility to property-owning commoners, had finally been extended to enfranchise the broad mass of the people -- well, men, anyway: women would not get the vote until some years into the 20th century.

But there the trend to self-government stopped. The people had won the right to choose who would rule them, as their representatives in Parliament.

They had not quite won the right to rule themselves: to vote directly on matters of state, with or without the approval of their elected representatives.

Representative democracy had not yet given way to direct democracy. And for a century or more, that is where things lay.

The great debate of our day will be whether to carry the democratic revolution to its final stage. As Parliament once wrested power from a reluctant king, so the people, it might be hoped, will soon wrest power from Parliament.

All of which is by way of flagging the revolution that is about to hit the once stolid province of Ontario, under the activist Conservative government of Mike Harris. For all its purported radicalism, the Tory "Common Sense Revolution" has until now been largely an exercise in restoring the status quo, circa 1985. It was the intervening decade, when the government of Ontario doubled its spending and tripled its debts, that marked the real departure from historic norms.

But the latest Tory reform is truly revolutionary in potential. If the recommendations of a committee of the Ontario legislature are adopted in legislation, the people will take a greater hand in their own government than ever before. In particular, the committee suggests that no tax increase should become law without being approved in a provincial referendum. A similar rule would apply to constitutional amendments. In fact, any scheme that attracted the signatures of more than 10 per cent of the population -- so- called citizens' initiatives -- would be put to a vote.

No single measure promises to do more to alter the balance of power between the people and their government. The proposal raises a host of legal and technical issues, to be sure: The committee makes some sensible suggestions as to what would count as a "tax increase" under the law (user fees would be exempt, as would increases that are part of a revenue neutral package, i.e. that are offset by tax cuts), and what sort of questions could be asked (yes or no, please, and nothing that would violate the constitution).

But of course the real issue is one of political philosophy, and whether or not one subscribes to the doctrine of the divine right of Parliament. Naturally, the prospect of important matters being left to the uneducated to decide is greatly distressing to the parties of the badly educated -- and never more so than when the issue is raising taxes. "We believe it is impossible to predict the kinds of circumstances ... that may lead a government to impose such an invariably unpopular measure," wrote the committee's Liberal minority in its dissent, "but that it must not be hamstrung in its ability to do so." The choice of words, "hamstrung," is revealing. The Tories are not proposing to outlaw tax hikes, or to place any limit on them. If a government wished to raise taxes by, say, 14 per cent -- which is how much provincial revenues increased, over and above economic growth, during the Liberal years -- it could still do so. It would just have to ask the people first. It is, after all, their money.

What is at issue here, in other words, is not the size and shape of government. It is rather the principle of majority rule. The demands of interest groups seeking public funds are theoretically infinite, since no single group has any reason to limit its own demand to accommodate the others.

But the taxpayer's willingness to pay is decidedly finite. As governments are more vulnerable to pressure from an organized few than the disparate many, the result in recent decades has been an escalation of spending, taxing and borrowing beyond anything that the broader public could have wanted.

There is an irony here. Much as democracy, by imposing constitutional limits on the monarch's powers, in the end proved the salvation of the English Crown, so the limits imposed by direct democracy may help restore the legitimacy of representative democracy. At any rate, if the people wish to exercise some powers that were formerly the preserve of their elected leaders, that is surely their right. It is, after all, their government.