Politics & Power Quote by John Drinkwater

Democracy, here, isn’t treated as a warm civic vibe but as an instrument with a job description: government’s "highest function" is to realize "the will of the people". Drinkwater’s intent is almost prosecutorial. By framing the claim as an analogy and then defining terms, he strips "best kind of government" of its sentimental haze and pins it to a measurable standard. If democracy is best, it’s not because it flatters our self-image; it’s because it performs a function more completely than its rivals.

The subtext is a quiet warning: if a democracy stops realizing popular will, it forfeits the very argument that legitimizes it. That’s a sharper position than it first appears. Drinkwater smuggles in a demanding criterion that can embarrass democracies as easily as it praises them. The emphasis on "most completely" also concedes imperfection. Democracy is not a moral crown, it’s the least-bad machine for a specific outcome, and the machine can jam.

Context matters. Drinkwater wrote in a Britain reshaped by mass politics, labor organizing, and post-World War I disillusionment, when "the people" had become both an electoral fact and a rhetorical weapon. His poet’s sensibility shows in the phrase "realisation of the will" - not merely representation, but translation from public desire into lived policy. It’s aspirational, but also pointed: rhetoric without realization is just pageantry. In an era of expanding suffrage and competing visions of nationhood, Drinkwater’s line reads like a democratic stress test disguised as civics.