"It could be said of democracy that all theory was against it and all experience for it."

From The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris.  Page 28.

Democracy has always been less popular than liberalism—if liberalism is a gift, democracy is the rattletrap truck that delivers it—and the two have distinctly different origins. Liberalism arose as a matter of principle, while democracy arose more for sociological than for intellectual reasons, and was always more about power than ideals. As Mill observed in 1859, the movements of societies toward democracy “are not the work of philosophers, but of the interests and instincts of large portions of society recently grown into strength.” Prominent among them were what the English called the gentry, a class whose wealth and influence came largely from scientific and technological innovations and free-market economies. They were trades and crafts people who gained power by gaining wealth, clawing their way to political prominence on the votes of previously disenfranchised multitudes who saw them as opening up fresh opportunities for all—which may explain why the poor, though impatient with snobs, demonstrate little animus toward the self-made rich. The process was not pretty, but it worked. “It could be said of democracy,” writes the historian Roland Stromberg, “that all theory was against it and all experience for it.”