Disclaimer: NTA forgot to print the passage for Questions 29–31 in the candidate response sheet. We reverse-engineered the passage based on student memory, so the passage below is not the original NTA text.
The practical virtue of democracy lies less in the claim that a majority is always wise than in the fact that democratic government remains corrigible. A policy can be criticised, an administration can be voted out, and rules can be revised without treating disagreement as treason. This flexibility matters because no political arrangement is born complete. Institutions must be able to reform themselves when experience exposes defects.
In a functioning democracy, therefore, change is normally sought through democratic procedure: persuasion, organisation, legislation, litigation and elections. These methods are slower than force, but their slowness is often a strength. Violence can remove a government quickly while leaving the habits that produced it untouched; it can also substitute the certainty of the victor for the consent of the governed. A revolution may destroy an intolerable order, but it does not by itself explain how the next order will command legitimacy.
There is nevertheless a limit to this preference for procedure. Where people possess genuine constitutional means to alter rulers and laws, resort to violence is difficult to defend. Where those means are entirely absent, however, revolution may become a viable alternative because peaceful correction has been closed off. The distinction is therefore sharp in principle: where elections and democratic remedies are real, reform should proceed through them; where no such path exists, revolutionary change may be the remaining route.
This is not an argument that revolution is indispensable to political progress. It is an argument for valuing a system that can repair itself before pressure for violent rupture becomes overwhelming. Democracy's advantage is precisely that it builds change into government rather than forcing every major disagreement to become a struggle over the existence of government itself.
