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Counting noses is a bad way to run anything, because most people are ignorant and are largely incapable of making decisions on the basis of reason. By contrast, the aristocrats is trained from birth to rule. Allowing ignorant amateurs to decide matters of state is like putting a group of toddlers at the helm of a guided missile cruiser. We here in the States are lucky in that the elite that formed the nation knew this to be true, and wisely insulated the people from the levers of political power.

Yet even with this isolation, allowing the common person a say in government has resulted in disaster. The common man operates almost entirely on the basis of emotion, and is easy for a demagogue to to manipulate. (Case in point: President Obama.) Rule on the basis of the "will of the people" is in reality rule by the most skillful demagogue.

As for atrocities: no king or emperor in history ever shed blood on the scale of a government by the people. A king's power is limited by the oath he swears to god; in a representative government, vox populi is vox dei, and as such is without limit. Hitler was, after all, an elected leader; Stalin is still loved by millions; the rule of both Mao Zedong and the Dear Leader were and are based largely upon the willing cooperation of millions of "jes' plain folks'. Even in America, we shed innocent blood on a scale that makes the worst excesses of the cruelest czar look like Sunday school. Get back to me when you find a king who allowed fifty million innocent babies to be legally murdered during his reign.