CHAPTER V

I

THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION AND ITS PROBLEMS

It is important to recognize that the anti-slavery agitation, the secession of the South, and the Civil War were, after all, only an episode in the course of American national development. The episode was desperately serious. Like the acute illness of a strong man, it almost killed its victim; and the crisis exposed certain weaknesses in our political organism, in the absence of which the illness would never have become acute. But the roots of our national vitality were apparently untouched by the disease. When the crisis was over, the country resumed with astonishing celerity the interrupted process of economic expansion. The germs of a severe disease, to which the Fathers of the Republic had given a place in the national Constitution, and which had been allowed to flourish, because of the lack of wholesome cohesion in the body politic—this alien growth had been cut out by a drastic surgical operation, and the robust patient soon recovered something like his normal health. Indeed, being in his own opinion even more robust than he was before the crisis, he was more eager than ever to convert his good health into the gold of satisfied desire. The ghost of slavery had been banished from our national banquet: and, relieved of this terror, the American people began to show, more aggressively than ever before, their ability to provide and to consume a bountiful feast. They were no longer children, grasping at the first fruits of a half-cultivated wilderness. They were adults, beginning to plan the satisfaction of on appetite which had been sharpened by self-denial, and made self-conscious by maturity.

The North, after the war was over, did not have much time for serious reflection upon its meaning and consequences. The Republican leaders did just enough thinking to carry them through the crisis; but once the rebellion was suppressed and the South partly de-nationalized in the name of reconstruction, the need and desire was for action rather than for thought. The anti-slavery agitation and the war had interrupted the process, which from the public point of view, was described as the economic development of the country, and which from an individual standpoint meant the making of money. For many years Americans had been unable, because of the ghost of slavery, to take full advantage of their liberties and opportunities; and now that the specter was exorcised, they gladly put aside any anxious political preoccupations. Politics could be left to the politicians. It was about time to get down to business. In this happiest of all countries, and under this best of all governments, which had been preserved at such an awful cost, the good American was entitled to give his undivided attention to the great work of molding and equipping the continent for human habitation, and incidentally to the minor task of securing his share of the rewards. A lively, even a frenzied, outburst of industrial, commercial, and speculative activity followed hard upon the restoration of peace. This activity and its effects have been the most important fact in American life during the forty years which have supervened; and it has assumed very different characteristics from those which it had assumed previous to the War. We must now consider the circumstances, the consequences, and the meaning of this economic revolution.

Although nobody in 1870 suspected it, the United States was entering upon a new phase of its economic career; and the new economy was bringing with it radical social changes. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War the rich and fertile states of the Middle West had become well populated. They had passed from an almost exclusively agricultural economy to one which was much more largely urban and industrial. The farms had become well-equipped; large cities were being built up; factories of various kinds were being established; and most important of all, the whole industrial organization of the country was being adjusted to transportation by means of the railroad. An industrial community, which was, comparatively speaking, well-organized and well-furnished with machinery, was taking the place of the agricultural community of 1830-1840, which was incoherent and scattered and which lacked everything except energy and opportunity. Such an increase of organization, capital, and equipment necessarily modified the outlook and interests of the people of the Middle West. While still retaining many of their local traits, their point of view had been approaching in certain respects that of the inhabitants of the East. They had ceased to be pioneers.

During the two decades after the Civil War, the territory, which was still in the early stage of agricultural development, was the first and second tier of states west of the Mississippi River. Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and finally the Dakotas were being opened for settlement; but in their case the effect and symptoms of this condition were not the same as they had been with the earlier pioneer states. Their economy was from the beginning adjusted to the railroad; and the railroad had made an essential difference. It worked in favor of a more comprehensive and definite organization and a more complete equipment. While the business interests of the new states were and still are predominantly agricultural, the railroads had transformed the occupation of farming. After 1870, the pioneer farmer was much less dependent than he had been upon local conditions and markets, and upon the unaided exertions of himself and his neighbors. He bought and sold in the markets of the world. He needed more capital and more machinery. He had to borrow money and make shrewd business calculations. From every standpoint his economic environment had become more complicated and more extended, and his success depended much more upon conditions which were beyond his control. He never was a pioneer in the sense that the early inhabitants of the Middle West and South had been pioneers; and he has never exercised any corresponding influence upon the American national temper. The pioneer had enjoyed his day, and his day was over. The Jack-of-all-trades no longer possessed an important economic function. The average farmer was, of course, still obliged to be many kinds of a rough mechanic, but for the most part he was nothing more than a farmer. Unskilled labor began to mean labor which was insignificant and badly paid. Industrial economy demanded the expert with his high and special standards of achievement. The railroads and factories could not be financed and operated without the assistance of well-paid and well-trained men, who could do one or two things remarkably well, and who did not pretend to do much of anything else. These men had to retain great flexibility and an easy adaptability of intelligence, because American industry and commerce remained very quick in its movements. The machinery which they handled was less permanent, and was intended to be less permanent than the machinery which was considered economical in Europe. But although they had to avoid routine and business rigidity on the penalty of utter failure, still they belonged essentially to a class of experts. Like all experts, they had to depend, not upon mere energy, untutored enthusiasm, and good-will, but upon careful training and single-minded devotion to a special task, and at the same time proper provision had to be made for coördinating the results of this highly specialized work. More complete organization necessarily accompanied specialization. The expert became a part of a great industrial machine. His individuality tended to disappear in his work. His interests became those of a group. Imperative economic necessities began to classify the individuals composing American society in the same way, if not to the same extent, that they had been classified in Europe.

This was a result which had never entered into the calculations of the pioneer Democrat. He had disliked specialization, because, as he thought, it narrowed and impoverished the individual; and he distrusted permanent and official forms of organization, because, as he thought, they hampered the individual. His whole political, social, and economic outlook embodied a society of energetic, optimistic, and prosperous democrats, united by much the same interests, occupations, and point of view. Each of these democrats was to be essentially an all-round man. His conception of all-round manhood was somewhat limited; but it meant at least a person who was expansive in feeling, who was enough of a business man successfully to pursue his own interests, and enough of a politician to prevent any infringement or perversion of his rights. He never doubted that the desired combination of business man, politician, and good fellow constituted an excellent ideal of democratic individuality, that it was sufficiently realized in the average Western American of the Jacksonian epoch, that it would continue to be the type of admirable manhood, and that the good democrats embodying this type would continue to merit and to obtain substantial and approximately equal pecuniary rewards. Moreover, for a long time the vision remained sufficiently true. The typical American democrat described by De Tocqueville corresponded very well with the vision of the pioneer; and he did not disappear during the succeeding generation. For many years millions of Americans of much the same pattern were rewarded for their democratic virtue in an approximately similar manner. Of course some people were poor, and some people were rich; but there was no class of the very rich, and the poverty of the poor was generally their own fault. Opportunity knocked at the door of every man, and the poor man of to-day was the prosperous householder of to-morrow. For a long time American social and economic conditions were not merely fluid, but consistent and homogeneous, and the vision of the pioneer was fulfilled. Nevertheless, this condition was essentially transient. It contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution and transformation; and this transformation made headway just as soon as, and just as far as, economic conditions began to prefer the man who was capable of specializing his work, and of organizing it with the work of his fellows.

The dominant note, consequently, of the pioneer period was an unformed national consistency, reached by means of a natural community of feeling and a general similarity of occupation and well-being. On the other hand, the dominant note of the period from 1870 until the present day has been the gradual disintegration of this early national consistency, brought about by economic forces making for specialization and organization in all practical affairs, for social classification, and finally for greater individual distinction. Moreover, the tendency towards specialization first began to undermine the very corner-stone of the pioneer's democratic edifice. If private interest and public weal were to be as harmonious as the pioneer assumed, every economic producer must be a practical politician, and there must be no deep-lying division between these primary activities. But the very first result of the specializing tendency was to send the man of business, the politician, and the lawyer off on separate tacks. Business interests became so absorbing that they demanded all of a man's time and energy; and he was obliged to neglect politics except in so far as politics affected business. In this same way, the successful lawyers after the War were less apt than formerly to become politicians and statesmen. They left public affairs largely to the unsuccessful lawyers. Politics itself became an occupation which made very exacting demands upon a man's time and upon his conscience. Public service or military success were no longer the best roads to public distinction. Men became renowned and distinguished quite as much, if not more, for achievements in their private and special occupations. Along with leadership of statesmen and generals, the American people began to recognize that of financiers, "captains of industry," corporation lawyers, political and labor "bosses," and these gentlemen assumed extremely important parts in the direction of American affairs. Officially, the new leaders were just like any other American citizen. No titles could be conferred upon them, and their position brought with it no necessary public responsibilities. Actually, however, they exercised in many cases more influence upon American social and political economy than did the official leaders. They were an intrusion, into the traditional economic political and social system, for which no provision had been made. Their special interests, and the necessities of their special tasks, made their manner of life different from that of other American citizens, and their peculiar opportunities enabled them to appropriate an unusually large share of the fruits of American economic development. Thus they seriously impaired the social and economic homogeneity, which the pioneer believed to be the essential quality of fruitful Americanism.

II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BUSINESS SPECIALIST

Before seeking to trace the consequences and the significance of this specialized organization of American practical affairs, we must examine its origin with some care. An exact and complete understanding thereof will in itself afford an unmistakable hint of the way in which its consequences are to be appraised, and wherever necessary, corrected. The great and increasing influence of the new unofficial leaders has been due not only to economic conditions and to individual initiative, but to the nature of our political ideas and institutions. The traditional American theory was that the individual should have a free hand. In so far as he was subject to public regulation and control such control should be exercised by local authorities, whereof the result would be a happy combination of individual prosperity and public weal. But this expectation, as we have seen, has proved to be erroneous. While it has, indeed, resulted in individual prosperity, the individual who has reaped most of the prosperity is not the average, but the special man; and however the public may have benefited from the process, the benefit is mixed with so many drawbacks that, even if it may not be wholly condemned, it certainly cannot be wholly approved. The plain fact is that the individual in freely and energetically pursuing his own private purposes has not been the inevitable public benefactor assumed by the traditional American interpretation of democracy. No doubt he has incidentally accomplished, in the pursuit of his own aggrandizement, certain manifest public benefits; but wherever public and private advantages have conflicted, he has naturally preferred the latter. And under our traditional political system there was, until recently, no effective way of correcting his preference.

As long as the economic opportunities of American life consisted chiefly in the appropriation and improvement of uncultivated land, the average energetic man had no difficulty in obtaining his fair share of the increasing American economic product; but the time came when such opportunities, although still important, were dwarfed by other opportunities, incident to the development of a more mature economic system. These opportunities, which were, of course, connected with the manufacturing, industrial, and technical development of the country, demanded under American conditions a very special type of man—the man who would bring to his task not merely energy, but unscrupulous devotion, originality, daring, and in the course of time a large fund of instructive experience. The early American industrial conditions differed from those of Europe in that they were fluid, and as a result of this instability, extremely precarious. Rapid changes in markets, business methods, and industrial machinery made it very difficult to build up a safe business. A manufacturer or a merchant could not secure his business salvation, as in Europe, merely by the adoption of sound conservative methods. The American business man had greater opportunities and a freer hand than his European prototype; but he was also beset by more severe, more unscrupulous, and more dangerous competition. The industrious and thrifty farmer could be tolerably sure of a modest competence, due partly to his own efforts, and partly to the increased value of his land in a more populous community; but the business man had no such security. In his case it was war to the knife. He was presented with a choice between aggressive daring business operations, and financial insignificance or ruin.

No doubt this situation was due as much to the temper of the American business man as to his economic environment. American energy had been consecrated to economic development. The business man in seeking to realize his ambitions and purposes was checked neither by government control nor social custom. He had nothing to do and nothing to consider except his own business advancement and success. He was eager, strenuous, and impatient. He liked the excitement and the risk of large operations. The capital at his command was generally too small for the safe and conservative conduct of his business; and he was consequently obliged to be adventurous, or else to be left behind in the race. He might well be earning enormous profits one year and skirting bankruptcy the next. Under such a stress conservatism and caution were suicidal. It was the instinct of self-preservation, as well as the spirit of business adventure, which kept him constantly seeking for larger markets, improved methods, or for some peculiar means of getting ahead of his competitors. He had no fortress behind which he could hide and enjoy his conquests. Surrounded as he was by aggressive enemies and undefended frontiers, his best means of security lay in a policy of constant innovation and expansion. Moreover, even after he had obtained the bulwark of sufficient capital and more settled industrial surroundings, he was under no temptation to quit and enjoy the spoils of his conquests. The social, intellectual, or even the more vulgar pleasures, afforded by leisure and wealth, could bring him no thrill, which was anything like as intense as that derived from the exercise of his business ability and power. He could not conquer except by virtue of a strong, tenacious, adventurous, and unscrupulous will; and after he had conquered, this will had him in complete possession. He had nothing to do but to play the game to the end—even though his additional profits were of no living use to him.

If, however, the fluid and fluctuating nature of American economic conditions and the fierceness of American competitive methods turned business into a state of dangerous and aggressive warfare, the steady and enormous expansion of the American markets made the rewards of victory correspondingly great. Not only was the population of the country increasing at an enormous rate, but the demand for certain necessary products, services, and commodities was increasing at a higher rate than the population. The American people were still a most homogeneous collection of human beings. They wanted very much the same things; they wanted more of these things year after year; and they immediately rewarded any cheapening of the product by buying it in much larger quantities. The great business opportunities of American life consisted, consequently, in supplying some popular or necessary article or service at a cheaper price than that at which any one else could furnish it; and the great effort of American business men was, of course, to obtain some advantage over their competitors in producing such an article or in supplying such a service. The best result of this condition was a constant improvement in the mechanism of production. Cheapness was found to depend largely upon the efficient use of machinery, and the efficient use of machinery was found to depend upon constant wear and quick replacement by a better machine. But while the economic advantage of the exhausting use and the constant improvement of machinery was the most important economic discovery of the American business man, he was also encouraged by his surroundings to seek economies in other and less legitimate ways. It was all very well to multiply machines and make them more efficient, but similar improvements were open to competitors. The great object was to obtain some advantage which was denied to your competitors. Then the business man could not only secure his own position, but utterly rout and annihilate his adversaries.

At this point the railroads came to the assistance of the aggressive and unscrupulous business man. They gave such men an advantage over their competitors by granting them special rates; and inasmuch as this practice has played a decisive part in American business development, its effect and its meaning, frequently as they have been pointed out, must be carefully traced.

The railroads themselves are, perhaps, the most perfect illustration of the profits which accrue in a rapidly growing country from the possession of certain advantages in supplying to the public an indispensable service. They were not built, as in most European states, under national supervision and regulation, or according to a general plan which prevented unnecessary competition. Their routes and their methods were due almost entirely to private enterprise and to local economic necessities. They originated in local lines radiating from large cities; and only very slowly did their organization come to correspond with the great national routes of trade. The process of building up the leading systems was in the beginning a process of combining the local roads into important trunk lines. Such combinations were enormously profitable, because the business of the consolidated roads increased in a much larger proportion than did the cost of financing end operating the larger mileage; and after the combinations were made the owners of the consolidated road were precisely in the position of men who had obtained a certain strategic advantage in supplying a necessary service to their fellow-countrymen. Their terminals, rights of way, and machinery could not be duplicated except at an increased cost, and their owners were in a position necessarily to benefit from the growth of the country in industry and population. No doubt their economic position was in certain respects precarious. They did not escape the necessity, to which other American business enterprises had to submit, of fighting for a sufficient share of the spoils. But in making the fight, they had acquired certain advantages which, if they were intelligently used, would necessarily result in victory; and as we all know, these advantages have proved to be sufficient. The railroads have been the greatest single source of large American fortunes, and the men who control the large railroad systems are the most powerful and conspicuous American industrial leaders.

Important, however, as has been the direct effect of big railroad systems on the industrial economy of the country, their indirect effects have probably been even more important. In one way or another, they have been the most effective of all agencies working for the larger organization of American industries. Probably such an organization was bound to have come in any event, because the standard economic needs of millions of thrifty democrats could in the long run be most cheaply satisfied by means of well-situated and fully equipped industrial plants of the largest size; but the railroad both hastened this result and determined its peculiar character. The population of the United States is so scattered, its distances so huge, and its variations in topographical level so great, that its industries would necessarily have remained very local in character, as long as its system of transportation depended chiefly upon waterways and highways. Some kind of quick transportation across country was, consequently, an indispensable condition of the national organization of American industry and commerce. The railroad not only supplied this need, but coming as it did pretty much at the beginning of our industrial development, it largely modified and determined the character thereof. By considerably increasing the area within which the products of any one locality could be profitably sold, it worked naturally in favor of the concentration of a few large factories in peculiarly favorable locations; and this natural process was accelerated by the policy which the larger companies adopted in the making of their rates. The rapid growth of big producing establishments was forced, because of the rebates granted to them by the railroads. Without such rebates the large manufacturing corporation controlled by a few individuals might still have come into existence; but these individuals would have been neither as powerful as they now are, nor as opulent, nor as much subject to suspicion.

It is peculiarly desirable to understand, consequently, just how these rebates came to be granted. It was, apparently, contrary to the interest of the railroad companies to cut their rates for the benefit of any one class of customers; and it was, also, an illegal practice, which had to be carried on by secret and underhand methods. Almost all the state laws under which corporations engaged in transportation had been organized, had defined railways, like highways, as public necessities. Such corporations had usually been granted by the states the power to condemn land,—and the delegation of such a power to a private company meant, of course, that it owed certain responsibilities to the public as a common carrier, among which the responsibility of not allowing special privileges to any one customer was manifestly to be included. When the railroad managers have been asked why they cut their published rates and evaded the laws, they have always contended that they were forced to do so; and whatever may be thought of the plea, it cannot be lightly set aside. As we have seen, the trunk lines leading from Chicago to the coast were the result of the consolidation of local roads. After the consolidations had taken place, these companies began to compete fiercely for through freight, and the rebates were an incident in this competition. The trunk lines in the early years of their existence were in the position of many other American business enterprises. For the time being, they were more than competent to carry all the freight offered at competitive points. Inasmuch as there was not enough to go around, they fought mercilessly for what business there was. When a large individual shipper was prepared to guarantee them a certain amount of freight in return for special rates, they were obliged either to grant the rates or to lose the business. Of course they submitted, and defended their submission as a measure of self-preservation.

No great intelligence is required to detect in this situation the evidence of a vicious circle. The absorption of Americans in business affairs, and the free hand which the structure and ideals of American life granted them, had made business competition a fierce and merciless affair; while at the same time the fluid nature of American economic conditions made success very precarious. Every shrewd and resolute man would seek to secure himself against the dangers of this situation by means of special advantages, and the most effective of all special advantages would, of course, be special railroad rates. But a shipper such as John D. Rockefeller could obtain special rates only because the railroads were in a position similar to his own, and were fighting strenuously for supremacy. The favored shipper and the railroad both excused themselves on the ground of self-preservation, and sometimes even claimed that it was just for a large shipper to obtain better rates than a small one. This was all very well for the larger shipper and the railroad, but in the meantime what became of the small shipper, whom Mr. Rockefeller was enabled to annihilate by means of his contracts with the railroad companies? The small shipper saw himself forced out of business, because corporations to whom the state had granted special privileges as common carriers, had a private interest in doing business with his bigger, more daring, and unscrupulous competitors.

Of course no such result could have happened, if at any point in this vicious circle of private interests, there had been asserted a dominant public interest; and there are several points at which such an interest might well have been intruded. The circle would have been broken, if, for instance, the granting of illegal rebates had been effectively prohibited; but as a matter of fact they could not be effectively prohibited by the public authorities, to whom either the railroads or the large shippers were technically responsible. A shipper of oil in Cleveland, Ohio, would have a difficult time in protesting against illegal discrimination on the part of a railroad conducting an inter-state business and organized under the laws of New York. No doubt he could appeal to the Federal government; but the Federal government had been, for the time being, disqualified by many different causes from effective interference. In the first place there was to be overcome the conventional democratic prejudice against what was called centralization. A tradition of local control over the machinery of transit and transportation was dominant during the early period of railroad construction. The fact that railways would finally become the all-important vehicles of inter-state commerce was either overlooked or considered unimportant. The general government did not interfere—except when, as in the case of the Pacific lines, its interference and assistance were solicited by private interests. For a long time the idea that the Federal government had any general responsibility in respect to the national transportation system was devoid of practical consequences.

In the end an Inter-state Commerce law was passed, in which the presence of a national interest in respect to the American system of transportation was recognized. But this law, like our tariff laws, was framed for the benefit chiefly of a combination of local and special interests; and it served little to advance any genuine national interest in relation to the railroads. To be sure it did forbid rebates, but the machinery for enforcing the prohibition was inefficient, and during another twenty years the prohibition remained substantially a dead letter. The provisions of the law forbidding rebates were in truth merely a bit of legal hypocrisy. Rebates could not be openly defended; but the business of the country was honeycombed with them, and the majority of the shippers in whose interest the law was passed did not want the prohibition enforced. Their influence at Washington was sufficiently powerful to prevent the adoption of any effective measures for the abatement of the evil. The Federal Inter-state Commerce Commission, unlike the local authorities, would have been fully competent to abolish rebates; but the plain truth was that the effective public opinion in the business world either supported the evil or connived at it. The private interests at stake were, for the time being, too strong for the public interest. The whole American business tradition was opposed to government interference with prevailing business practices; and in view of this fact the responsibility for the rebates cannot be fixed merely upon the railroads and the trusts. The American system had licensed energetic and unscrupulous individual aggrandizement as the best means of securing a public benefit; and rebates were merely a flagrant instance of the extent to which public opinion permitted the domination of private interests.

The failure of the Federal government to protect the public interest in a matter over which the state governments had no effective control, has greatly accelerated the organization of American industries on a national scale, but for private and special purposes. Certain individuals controlling certain corporations were enabled to obtain a decided advantage in supplying certain services and products to the enormously increasing American market; and once those individuals and corporations had obtained dominant positions, it was in their interest to strengthen one another's hands in every possible way. One big corporation has as a rule preferred to do business with another big corporation. They were all of them producing some standard commodity or service, and it is part of the economical conduct of such businesses to buy and sell so far as possible in large quantities and under long contracts. Such contracts reduced to a comparatively low level the necessary uncertainties of business. It enabled the managers of these corporations to count upon a certain market for their product or a certain cost for part of their raw material; and it must be remembered that the chief object of this whole work of industrial organization was to diminish the hazards of unregulated competition and to subject large business operations to effective control. A conspicuous instance of the effect of such interests and motives may be seen in the lease of the ore lands belonging to the Great Northern Railroad to the United States Steel Corporation. The railroad company owned the largest body of good ore in the country outside of the control of the Steel Corporation, and if these lands had been leased to many small companies, the ability of the independent steel manufacturers to compete with the big steel company would have been very much increased. But the Great Northern Railroad Company found it simpler and more secure to do business with one large than a number of small companies; and in this way the Steel Corporation has obtained almost a monopoly of the raw material most necessary to the production of finished steel. It will be understood, consequently, how inevitably these big corporations strengthen one another's hands; and it must be added that they had political as well as economic motives for so doing. Although the big fellows sometimes indulge in the luxury of fierce fighting, such fights are always the prelude to still closer agreements. They are all embarked in the same boat; and surrounded as they are by an increasing amount of enmity, provoked by their aggrandizement, they have every reason to lend one another constant and effective support.

There may be discerned in this peculiar organization of American industry an entangling alliance between a wholesome and a baleful tendency. The purpose which prompted men like John D. Rockefeller to escape from the savage warfare in which so many American business men were engaged, was in itself a justifiable and ameliorating purpose. Competition in American business was insufficiently moderated either by the state or by the prevailing temper of American life. No sensible and resourceful man will submit to such a precarious existence without making some attempt to escape from it; and if the means which Mr. Rockefeller and others took to secure themselves served to make the business lives of their competitors still more precarious, such a result was only the expiation which American business men were obliged to pay for their own excesses. The concentrated leadership, the partial control, the thorough organization thereby effected, was not necessarily a bad thing. It was in some respects a decidedly good thing, because leadership of any kind has certain intrinsic advantages. The trusts have certainly succeeded in reducing the amount of waste which was necessitated by the earlier condition of wholly unregulated competition. The competitive methods of nature have been, and still are, within limits indispensable; but the whole effort of civilization has been to reduce the area within which they are desirably effective; and it is entirely possible that in the end the American system of industrial organization will constitute a genuine advance in industrial economy. Large corporations, which can afford the best machinery; which control abundant capital, and which can plan with scrupulous economy all the details of producing and selling an important product or service, are actually able to reduce the cost of production to a minimum; and in the cases of certain American corporations such results have actually been achieved. The new organization of American industry has created an economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and indefinitely serviceable to the American people.

On the other hand, its serviceability is much diminished by the special opportunities it gives a few individuals. These opportunities do not amount in any case to a monopoly, but they do amount to a species of economic privilege which enable them to wring profits from the increasing American market disproportionate to the value of their economic services. What is still more unfortunate, however, is the equivocal position of these big corporations in respect to the laws under which they are organized, and in respect to the public authorities which are supposed to control them. Many of the large railway and industrial corporations have reached their present size partly by an evasion or a defiance of the law. Their organizers took advantage of the American system of local self-government and the American disposition to reduce the functions of the Federal government to a minimum—they took advantage of these legal conditions and political ideas to organize an industrial machinery which cannot be effectively reached by local statutes and officials. The favorable corporation laws of some states have been used as a means of preying upon the whole country; and the unfavorable corporation laws of other states have been practically nullified. The big corporations have proved to be too big and powerful for the laws and officials to which the American political system has subjected them; and their equivocal legal position has resulted in the corruption of American public life and in the serious deterioration of our system of local government.

The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since the Civil War has been the establishment in the heart of the American economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition and power. The greater American railroad and industrial corporations control resources and conduct operations on a scale unprecedented in the economic history of the world. The great American industrial leaders have accumulated fortunes for which there is also no precedent on the part of men who exercise no official political power. These inequalities are the result of the organization of American industry on almost a national scale,—an organization which was brought about as a means of escape from the intolerable evils of unregulated competition. Every aspect of American business methods has helped to make them inevitable, and the responsibility for them must be distributed over the whole business and social fabric. But in spite of the fact that they have originated as the inevitable result of American business methods and political ideas and institutions, they constitute a serious problem for a democracy to face; and this problem has many different aspects. Its most serious aspect is constituted by the sheer size of the resulting inequalities. The rich men and the big corporations have become too wealthy and powerful for their official standing in American life. They have not obeyed the laws. They have attempted to control the official makers, administrators, and expounders of the law. They have done little to allay and much to excite the resentment and suspicion. In short, while their work has been constructive from an economic and industrial standpoint, it has made for political corruption and social disintegration. Children, as they are, of the traditional American individualistic institutions, ideas, and practices, they have turned on their parents and dealt them an ugly wound. Either these economic monsters will destroy the system of ideas, institutions, and practices out of which they have issued or else be destroyed by them.

III

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL SPECIALIST

The corporations were able to secure and to exercise an excessive and corrupt influence on legislation, because their aggrandizement coincided with a process of deterioration in our local political institutions. We have seen that the stress of economic competition had specialized the American business man and made him almost exclusively preoccupied with the advancement of his own private interests; and one of the first results of this specialization was an alteration in his attitude towards the political welfare of his country. Not only did he no longer give as much time to politics as he formerly did, but as his business increased in size and scope, he found his own interests by way of conflicting at many points with the laws of his country and with its well-being. He did not take this conflict very seriously. He was still reflected in the mirror of his own mind as a patriotic and a public-spirited citizen; but at the same time his ambition was to conquer, and he did not scruple to sacrifice both the law and the public weal to his own prosperity. All unknowingly he began to testify to a growing and a decisive division between the two primary interests of American life,—between the interest of the individual business man and the interest of the body politic; and he became a living refutation of the amiable theories of the Jacksonian Democrat that the two must substantially coincide. The business man had become merely a business man, and the conditions which had made him less of a politician had also had its effect upon the men whose business was that of politics. Just as business had become specialized and organized, so politics also became subject to specialization and organization. The appearance of the "Captain of Industry" was almost coincident with the appearance of the "Boss."

There has been a disposition to treat the "Boss" chiefly as the political creature of the corrupt corporation; and it is undoubtedly true that one of the most important functions of the municipal and state "Bosses" has been that of conducting negotiations with the corporations. But to consider the specialized organization of our local politics as the direct result of specialized organization of American business is wholly to misunderstand its significance. The two processes are the parallel effects of the same conditions and ideas working in different fields. Business efficiency under the conditions prevailing in our political and economic fabric demanded the "Captain of Industry." Political efficiency under our system of local government demanded the "Boss." The latter is an independent power who has his own special reasons for existence. He put in an embryonic appearance long before the large corporations had obtained anything like their existing power in American politics; and he will survive in some form their reduction to political insignificance. He has been a genuine and within limits a useful product of the American democracy; and it would be fatal either to undervalue or to misunderstand him.

The American system of local self-government encouraged the creation of the political "Boss," because it required such an enormous amount of political business. Some one was needed to transact this business, and the professional politician was developed to supply the need. There was no reason why such a need should have existed; because the amount of political business incident to state government could have been very much economized by a simpler method of organization. But American democratic ideas during the years when the state governments took form were wholly opposed to simplicity of organization. The state constitutions adopted during the period of Jacksonian supremacy seem designed to make local government costly in time and energy and irresponsible in action; and they provided the legal scenery in the midst of which the professional politician became the only effective hero.

The state constitutions were all very much influenced by the Federal instrument, but in the copies many attempts were made to improve upon the model. The Democracy had come to believe that the Federal Constitution tended to encourage independence and even special efficiency on the part of Federal officials; and it proposed to correct such an erroneous tendency in the more thoroughly democratic state governments. No attempt was, indeed, made to deprive the executive and the judicial officials of independence by making them the creatures of the legislative branch; for such a change, although conforming to earlier democratic ideas, would have looked in the direction of a concentration of responsibility. The far more insidious course was adopted of keeping the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branches of the government technically separate, while at the same time depriving all three of any genuine independence and efficiency. The term of the executive, for instance, was not allowed to exceed one or two years. The importance of his functions was diminished. His power of appointment was curtailed. Many of his most important executive assistants were elected by popular vote and made independent of him. In some few instances he was even deprived of a qualified veto upon legislation. But the legislature itself was not treated much better. Instead of deriving its power from a short constitution which conferred upon it full legislative responsibilities and powers, the tendency has been to incorporate an enormous mass of special and detailed legislation in the fundamental law, and so to diminish indefinitely the power of the legislative branch either to be useful or dangerous. Finally state judges instead of being appointed for life were usually elected for limited terms, so that they could scarcely avoid being more "amenable to public opinion." The tendency in every respect was to multiply elections and elective officials, divide responsibility and power, and destroy independence. The more "democratic" these constitutions became, the more clearly the Democracy showed its disposition to distrust its own representatives, and to deprive them of any chance of being genuinely representative.

The object of the Jacksonion Democrat in framing constitutions of this kind was to keep political power in the hands of the "plain people," and to forestall the domination of administrative and legislative specialists. The effect was precisely the opposite. They afforded the political specialist a wonderful opportunity. The ordinary American could not pretend to give as much time to politics as the smooth operation of this complicated machine demanded; and little by little there emerged in different parts of the country a class of politicians who spent all their time in nominating and electing candidates to these numerous offices. The officials so elected, instead of being responsible to the people, were responsible to the men to whom they owed their offices; and their own individual official power was usually so small that they could not put what little independence they possessed to any good use. As a matter of fact, they used their official powers chiefly for the benefit of their creators. They appointed to office the men whom the "Bosses" selected. They passed the measures which the machine demanded. In this way the professional politician gradually obtained a stock of political goods wherewith to maintain and increase his power. Reënforced by the introduction of the spoils system first into the state and then into the Federal civil services, a process of local political organization began after 1830 to make rapid headway. Local leaders appeared in different parts of the country who little by little relieved the farmer and the business man of the cares and preoccupations of government. In the beginning the most efficient of these politicians were usually Jacksonian Democrats, and they ruled both in the name of the people and by virtue of a sturdy popular following. They gradually increased in power, until in the years succeeding the war they became the dominant influence in local American politics, and had won the right to be called something which they would never have dared to call themselves, viz. a governing class.

While the local "Boss" nearly always belonged to the political party dominant in his neighborhood, so that he could in ordinary elections depend upon the regular party vote, still the real source of his power consisted in a band of personal retainers; and the means by which such groups were collected and held together contain a curious mixture of corruption and democracy. In the first place the local leader had to be a "good fellow" who lived in the midst of his followers and knew all about them. His influence was entirely dependent upon personal kindliness, loyalty, and good-comradeship. He was socially the playmate and the equal of his followers, and the relations among them were characterized by many admirable qualities. The group was within limits a genuine example of social democracy, and was founded on mutual understanding, good-will, and assistance. The leader used his official and unofficial power to obtain jobs for his followers. He succored them when in need; he sometimes protected them against the invidious activity of the police or the prosecuting attorneys; he provided excursions and picnics for them in hot weather; he tied them to himself by a thousand bonds of interest and association; he organized them into a clan, who supported him blindly at elections in return for a deal of personal kindliness and a multitude of small services; he became their genuine representative, whether official or not, because he represented their most vital interests and satisfied their most pressing and intimate needs.

The general method of political organization indicated above was perfected in the two decades succeeding the Civil War. The American democracy was divided politically into a multitude of small groups, organized chiefly for the purpose of securing the local and individual interests of these groups and their leaders, and supported by local and personal feeling, political patronage, and petty "graft." These groups were associated with both parties, and merely made the use of partisan ties and cries to secure the coöperation of more disinterested voters. The result was that so far as American political representation was merely local, it was generally corrupt, and it was always selfish. The leader's power depended absolutely on an appeal to the individual, neighborhood, and class interests of his followers. They were the "people"; he was the popular tribune. He could not retain his power for a month, in case he failed to subordinate every larger interest to the flattery, cajolery, and nourishment of his local clan. Thus the local representative system was poisoned at its source. The alderman, the assemblyman, or the congressman, even if he were an honest man, represented little more than the political powers controlling his district; and to be disinterested in local politics was usually equivalent to being indifferent.

Although these local clans were the basis of American political organization, they were not, of course, its ultimate fruit. In many of the cities, large and small, and in some of the states the leaders of the local groups were subordinated to one of their number who became the real "Boss" and who strengthened the district organizations by using for their benefit the municipal, state, and Federal patronage. The relation of the municipal or state "Boss" to the district leaders was similar to the relation which the district leader bore to his more important retainers. The "Boss" first obtained his primacy by means of diplomatic skill or force of character; and his ability to retain it depended upon his ability to satisfy the demands of the district leaders for patronage, while at the same time leading the organization to victory in the local elections. His special duties as "Boss" required personal prestige, strength of will, power of persuasive talking, good judgment of men, loyalty to his promises and his followers, and a complete lack of scruple. Unlike the district leader, however, the municipal "Boss" has tended to become a secretive and somewhat lonely person, who carried on his business behind closed doors, and on whom was visited the odium incurred by this whole system of political organization. The district leader either does not incur or is less affected by this odium, because his social status is precisely that of his followers. The "Boss," on the other hand, by this wealth and public position would naturally be an important member of the society in which he lives, whereas as a matter of fact he has come to be ostracized because of the source of his power and wealth. His leadership over-reached the district clan, which was real social basis; and the consequence was that the "Boss" became, to all appearances, a very unpopular man in the democracy which he ruled.

His secretiveness and his unpopularity point to one of the most important functions of the municipal and state "Bosses," to which as yet only incidental reference has been made. The "Boss" became the man who negotiated with the corporations, and through whom they obtained what they wanted. We have already seen that the large corporation, particularly those owning railroad and municipal franchises, have found that the purchase of a certain amount of political power was a necessary consequence of their dubious legal position. A traffic of this kind was not one, of course, to which many people could be admitted. It must be transmitted in secret, and by people who possessed full authority. An agreement to secure certain franchises or certain needed legislation in return for certain personal or party favors was not an agreement which could be made between a board of directors and a group of district leaders. If a large number of people were familiar with the details of such negotiations, something more than a hint thereof would be sure to leak out; and unquestionably the fact that a traffic of this kind was part of the political game had much to do with the ability of the municipal or state "Boss" to obtain and to keep his power. The profits not only enabled him to increase party funds and to line his own pockets, but it also furnished him with a useful and abundant source of patronage. He could get positions for the political henchmen of his district leaders, not only with the local and state governments, but with the corporations. Thus every "Boss," even those whose influence did not extend beyond an election district, was more or less completely identified with the corporations who occupied within his bailiwick any important relation to the state.

This alliance between the political machines and the big corporations—particularly those who operate railroads or control municipal franchises—was an alliance between two independent and coördinate powers in the kingdom of American practical affairs. The political "Boss" did not create the industrial leader for his own good purposes. Neither did the industrial leader create the machine and its "Boss," although he has done much to confirm the latter's influence. Each of them saw an opportunity to turn to his own account the individualistic "freedom" of American politics and industry. Each of them was enabled by the character of our political traditions to obtain an amount of power which the originators of those political ideas never anticipated, and which, if not illegal, was entirely outside the law. It so happened that the kind of power which each obtained was very useful to the other. A corporation which derived its profits from public franchises, or from a business transacted in many different states, found the purchase of a local or state machine well within its means and well according to its interests. The professional politicians who had embarked in politics as a business and who were making what they could out of it for themselves and their followers, could not resist this unexpected and lucrative addition to their market. But it must be remembered that the alliance was founded on interest rather than association, on mutual agreement rather than on any effective subordination one to another. A certain change in conditions might easily make their separate interests diverge, and abstract all the profits from their traffic. If anything happened, for instance, to make inter-state railroad corporations less dependent on the state governments, they would no longer need the expense of subsidizing the state machines. There are signs at the present time that these interests are diverging, and that such alliances will be less dangerous in the future than they have been in the past. But even if the alliance is broken, the peculiar unofficial organization of American industry and politics will persist, and will constitute, both in its consequences and its significance, two of our most important national problems.

It would be as grave a mistake, however, absolutely to condemn this process of political organization as it would absolutely to condemn the process of industrial organization. The huge corporation and the political machine were both created to satisfy a real and a permanent need—the needs of specialized leadership and associated action in these two primary American activities. That in both of these cases the actual method of organization has threatened vital public interests, and even the very future of democracy has been due chiefly to the disregard by the official American political system of the necessity and the consequences of specialized leadership and associated action. The political system was based on the assumption that the individualism it encouraged could be persuaded merely by the power of words to respect the public interest, that public officials could be deprived of independence and authority for the real benefit of the "plain people," and that the "plain people" would ask nothing from the government but their legal rights. These assumptions were all erroneous; and when associated action and specialized leadership became necessary in local American politics, the leaders and their machine took advantage of the defective official system to build up an unofficial system, better suited to actual popular needs. The "people" wanted the government to do something for them, and the politicians made their living and served their country by satisfying the want. To be sure, the "people" they benefited were a small minority of the whole population whose interests were far from being the public interest; but it was none the less natural that the people, whoever they were, should want the government to do more for them than to guarantee certain legal rights, and it was inevitable that they should select leaders who could satisfy their positive, if selfish, needs.

The consequence has been, however, a separation of actual political power from official political responsibility. The public officers are still technically responsible for the good government of the states, even if, as individuals, they have not been granted the necessary authority effectively to perform their task. But their actual power is even smaller than their official authority. They are almost completely controlled by the machine which secures their election or appointment. The leader or leaders of that machine are the rulers of the community, even though they occupy no offices and cannot be held in any way publicly responsible. Here, again, as in the case of the multi-millionaire, we have an example of a dangerous inequality in the distribution of power, and one which tends to maintain and perpetuate itself. The professional politician is frequently beaten and is being vigorously fought; but he himself understands how necessary he is under the existing local political organization, and how difficult it will be to dislodge him. Beaten though he be again and again, he constantly recovers his influence, because he is performing a necessary political task and because he is genuinely representative of the needs of his followers. Organizations such as Tammany in New York City are founded on a deeply rooted political tradition, a group of popular ideas, prejudices, and interests, and a species of genuine democratic association which are a guarantee of a long and tenacious life. They will survive much of the reforming machinery which is being created for their extirpation.

IV

THE LABOR UNION AND THE DEMOCRATIC TRADITION

One other decisive instance of this specialized organization of American activity remains to be considered—that of the labor unions. The power which the unions have obtained in certain industrial centers and the tightness of their organization would have seemed anomalous to the good Jacksonian Democrat. From his point of view the whole American democracy was a kind of labor union whose political constitution provided for a substantially equal division of the products of labor; and if the United States had remained as much of an agricultural community as it was in 1830, the Jacksonian system would have preserved a much higher degree of serviceability.

Except in the case of certain local Granger and Populist movements, the American farmers have never felt the necessity of organization to advance either their economic or their political interests. But when the mechanic or the day-laborer gathered into the cities, he soon discovered that life in a democratic state by no means deprived him of special class interests. No doubt he was at worst paid better than his European analogues, because the demand for labor in a new country was continually outrunning the supply; but on occasions he was, like his employer, threatened with merciless competition. The large and continuous stream of foreign immigrants, whose standards of living were in the beginning lower than those which prevailed in this country, were, particularly in hard times, a constant menace not merely to his advancement, but to the stability of his economic situation; and he began to organize partly for the purpose of protecting himself against such competition. During the past thirty years the work of organization has made enormous strides; and it has been much accelerated by the increasing industrial power of huge corporations. The mechanic and the laborer have come to believe that they must meet organization with organization, and discipline with discipline. Their object in forming trade associations has been militant. Their purpose has been to conquer a larger share of the economic product by aggressive associated action.

They have been very successful in accomplishing their object. In spite of the flood of alien immigration the American laborer has been able to earn an almost constantly increasing wage, and he devoutly thinks that his unions have been the chief agency of his stronger economic position. He believes in unionism, consequently, as he believes in nothing else. He is, indeed, far more aggressively preoccupied with his class, as contrasted with his individual interests, than are his employers. He has no respect for the traditional American individualism as applied to his own social and economic standing. Whenever he has had the power, he has suppressed competition as ruthlessly as have his employers. Every kind of contumelious reproach is heaped on the heads of the working men who dare to replace him when he strikes; and he does not scruple to use under such conditions weapons more convincing than the most opprobrious epithets. His own personality is merged in that of the union. No individual has any rights as opposed to the interests of the union. He fully believes, of course, in competition among employers, just as the employers are extremely enthusiastic over the individual liberty of the working man. But in his own trade he has no use for individuality of any kind. The union is to be composed of so many equal units who will work the same number of hours for the some wages, and no one of whom is to receive more pay even for more work. The unionist, that is, has come to depend upon his union for that material prosperity and advancement which, according to the American tradition, was to be the inevitable result of American political ideas and institutions. His attachment to his union has come to be the most important attachment of his life—more important in most cases than his attachment to the American ideal and to the national interest.

Some of the labor unions, like some of the corporations, have taken advantage of the infirmities of local and state governments to become arrogant and lawless. On the occasion of a great strike the strikers are often just as disorderly as they are permitted to be by the local police. When the police prevent them from resisting the employment of strike-breakers by force, they apparently believe that the political system of the country has been pressed into the service of their enemies; and they begin to wonder whether it will not be necessary for them to control such an inimical political organization. The average union laborer, even though he might hesitate himself to assault a "scab," warmly sympathizes with such assaults, and believes that in the existing state of industrial warfare they are morally justifiable. In these and in other respects he places his allegiance to his union and to his class above his allegiance to his state and to his country. He becomes in the interests of his organization a bad citizen, and at times an inhuman animal, who is ready to maim or even to kill another man and for the supposed benefit of himself and his fellows.

The most serious danger to the American democratic future which may issue from aggressive and unscrupulous unionism consists in the state of mind of which mob-violence is only one expression. The militant unionists are beginning to talk and believe as if they were at war with the existing social and political order—as if the American political system was as inimical to their interests as would be that of any European monarchy or aristocracy. The idea is being systematically propagated that the American government is one which favors the millionaire rather than the wage-earner; and the facts which either superficially or really support this view are sufficiently numerous to win for it an apparently increasing number of adherents. The union laborer is tending to become suspicious, not merely of his employer, but of the constitution of American society. His morals are becoming those of men engaged in a struggle for life. The manifestations of this state of mind in notion are not very numerous, although on many occasions they have worn a sufficiently sinister aspect. But they are numerous enough to demand serious attention, for the literature popular among the unionists is a literature, not merely of discontent, but sometimes of revolt.

Whether this aggressive unionism will ever become popular enough to endanger the foundations of the American political and social order, I shall not pretend to predict. The practical dangers resulting from it at any one time are largely neutralized by the mere size of the country and its extremely complicated social and industrial economy. The menace it contains to the nation as a whole can hardly become very critical as long as so large a proportion of the American voters are land-owning farmers. But while the general national well-being seems sufficiently protected for the present against the aggressive assertion of the class interests of the unionists, the legal public interest of particular states and cities cannot be considered as anywhere near so secure; and in any event the existence of aggressive discontent on that part of the unionists must constitute a serious problem for the American legislator and statesman. Is there any ground for such aggressive discontent? How has it come to pass that the American political system, which was designed to guarantee the welfare and prosperity of the people, is the subject of such violent popular suspicion? Can these suspicions be allayed merely by curbing the somewhat excessive opportunities of the rich man and by the diminution of his influence upon the government? Or does the discontent indicate the existence of more radical economic evils or the necessity of more radical economic reforms?

However the foregoing questions ought to be answered, there can be no doubt as to the nature of the answers, proposed by the unionists themselves. The unionist leaders frequently offer verbal homage to the great American principle of equal rights, but what they really demand is the abandonment of that principle. What they want is an economic and political order which will discriminate in favor of union labor and against non-union labor; and they want it on the ground that the unions have proved to be the most effective agency on behalf of economic and social amelioration of the wage-earner. The unions, that is, are helping most effectively to accomplish the task, traditionally attributed to the American democratic political system—the task of raising the general standard of living; and the unionists claim that they deserve on this ground recognition by the state and active encouragement. Obviously, however, such encouragement could not go very far without violating both the Federal and many state constitutions—the result being that there is a profound antagonism between our existing political system and what the unionists consider to be a perfectly fair demand. Like all good Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, they interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special rights.

Of all the hard blows which the course of American political and economic development has dealt the traditional system of political ideas and institutions, perhaps the hardest is this demand for discrimination on behalf of union labor. It means that the more intelligent and progressive American workingmen are coming to believe that the American political and economic organization does not sufficiently secure the material improvement of the wage-earner. This conviction may be to a large extent erroneous. Certain it is that the wages of unorganized farm laborers have been increasing as rapidly during the past thirty years as have the wages of the organized mechanics. But whether erroneous or not, it is widespread and deep-rooted; and whatever danger it possesses is derived from the fact that it affords to a substantially revolutionary purpose a large and increasing popular following. The other instances of organization for special purposes which have been remarked, have superficially, at least, been making for conservatism. The millionaire and the professional politician want above all things to be let alone, and to be allowed to enjoy the benefit of their conquests. But the labor organizations cannot exercise the power necessary in their opinion to their interests without certain radical changes in the political and economic order; and inasmuch as their power is likely to increase rather than diminish, the American people are confronted with the prospect of persistent, unscrupulous, and increasing agitation on behalf of an economic and political reorganization in favor of one class of citizens.

The large corporations and the unions occupy in certain respects a similar relation to the American political system. Their advocates both believe in associated action for themselves and in competition for their adversaries. They both demand governmental protection and recognition, but resent the notion of efficient governmental regulation. They have both reached their existing power, partly because of the weakness of the state governments, to which they are legally subject, and they both are opposed to any interference by the Federal government—except exclusively on their own behalf. Yet they both have become so very powerful that they are frequently too strong for the state governments, and in different ways they both traffic for their own benefit with the politicians, who so often control those governments. Here, of course, the parallelism ends and the divergence begins. The corporations have apparently the best of the situation because existing institutions are more favorable to the interests of the corporations than to the interests of the unionists; but on the other hand, the unions have the immense advantage of a great and increasing numerical strength. They are beginning to use the suffrage to promote a class interest, though how far they will travel on this perilous path remains doubtful. In any event, it is obvious that the development in this country of two such powerful and unscrupulous and well-organized special interests has created a condition which the founders of the Republic never anticipated, and which demands as a counterpoise a more effective body of national opinion, and a more powerful organization of the national interest.

V

GOVERNMENT BY LAWYERS

The corporation, the politician, and the union laborer are all illustrations of the organization of men representing fundamental interests for special purposes. The specialization of American society has not, however, stopped with its specialized organization. A similar process has been taking place in the different professions, arts, and trades; and of these much the most important is the gradual transformation of the function of the lawyer in the American political system. He no longer either performs the same office or occupies the same place in the public mind as he did before the Civil War; and the nature and meaning of this change cannot be understood without some preliminary consideration of the important part which American lawyers have played in American political history.

The importance of that part is both considerable and peculiar—as is the debt of gratitude which the American people owe to American lawyers. They founded the Republic, and they have always governed it. Some few generals, and even one colonel, have been elected to the Presidency of the United States; and occasionally business men of one kind or another have prevailed in local politics; but really important political action in our country has almost always been taken under the influence of lawyers. On the whole, American laws have been made by lawyers; they have been executed by lawyers; and, of course, they have been expounded by lawyers. Their predominance has been practically complete; and so far as I know, it has been unprecedented. No other great people, either in classic, mediæval, or modern times, has ever allowed such a professional monopoly of governmental functions. Certain religious bodies have submitted for a while to the dominion of ecclesiastical lawyers; but the lawyer has rarely been allowed to interfere either in the executive or the legislative branches of the government. The lawyer phrased the laws and he expounded them for the benefit of litigants. The construction which he has placed upon bodies of customary law, particularly in England, has sometimes been equivalent to the most permanent and fruitful legislation. But the people responsible for the government of European countries have rarely been trained lawyers, whereas American statesmen, untrained in the law, are palpable exceptions. This dominion of lawyers is so defiant of precedent that it must be due to certain novel and peremptory American conditions.

The American would claim, of course, that the unprecedented prominence of the lawyer in American politics is to be explained on the ground that the American government is a government by law. The lawyer is necessarily of subordinate importance in any political system tending towards absolutism. He is even of subordinate importance in a liberal system such as that of Great Britain, where Crown and Parliament, acting together, have the power to enact any desired legislation. The Federal Constitution, on the other hand, by establishing the Supreme Court as the interpreter of the Fundamental Law, and as a separate and independent department of the government, really made the American lawyer responsible for the future of the country. In so far as the Constitution continues to prevail, the Supreme Court becomes the final arbiter of the destinies of the United States. Whenever its action can be legally invoked, it can, if necessary, declare the will of either or both the President and Congress of no effect; and inasmuch as almost every important question of public policy raises corresponding questions of Constitutional interpretation, its possible or actual influence dominates American political discussion. Thus the lawyer, when consecrated as Justice of the Supreme Court, has become the High Priest of our political faith. He sits in the sanctuary and guards the sacred rights which have been enshrined in the ark of the Constitution.

The importance of lawyers as legislators and executives in the actual work of American government has been an indirect consequence of the peculiar function of the Supreme Court in the American political system. The state constitutions confer a corresponding function on the highest state courts, although they make no similar provision for the independence of the state judiciary. The whole business of American government is so entangled in a network of legal conditions that a training in the law is the beet education which an American public man can receive. The first question asked of any important legislative project, whether state or Federal, concerns its constitutionality; and the question of its wisdom is necessarily subordinate to these fundamental legal considerations. The statesman, who is not a lawyer, suffers under many disadvantages—not the least of which is the suspicion wherewith he is regarded by his legal fellow-statesmen. When they talk about a government by law, they really mean a government by lawyers; and they are by way of believing that government by anybody but lawyers is really unsafe.

The Constitution bestowed upon the American lawyer a constructive political function; and this function has been confirmed and even enlarged by American political custom and practice. The work of finally interpreting the Federal Constitution has rarely been either conceived or executed in a merely negative spirit. The construction, which successive generations of Supreme Court Justices have placed upon the instrument, has tended to enlarge its scope, and make it a legal garment, which was being better cut to fit the American political and economic organism. In its original form, and to a certain extent in its present form, the Constitution was in many respects an ambiguous document which might have been interpreted along several different lines; and the Supreme Court in its official expositions has been influenced by other than strictly legal and verbal reasons—by considerations of public welfare or by general political ideas. But such constructive interpretations have been most cautiously and discreetly admitted. In proclaiming them, the Supreme Court has usually represented a substantial consensus of the better legal opinion of the time; and constructions of this kind are accepted and confirmed only when any particular decision is the expression of some permanent advance or achievement in political thinking by the American lawyer. It becomes consequently of the utmost importance that American lawyers should really represent the current of national political opinion. The Supreme Court has been, on the whole, one of the great successes of the American political system, because the lawyers, whom it represented, were themselves representative of the ideas and interests of the bulk of their fellow-countrymen; and if for any reason they become less representative, a dangerous division would be created between the body of American public opinion and its official and final legal expositors. If the lawyers have any reason to misinterpret a serious political problem, the difficulty of dealing therewith is much increased, because in addition to the ordinary risks of political therapeutics there will be added that of a false diagnosis by the family doctor. The adequacy of the lawyers' training, the disinterestedness of their political motives, the fairness of their mental outlook, and the closeness of their contact with the national public opinion—all become matters of grave public concern.

It can be fairly asserted that the qualifications of the American lawyer for his traditional task as the official interpreter and guide of American constitutional democracy have been considerably impaired. Whatever his qualifications have been for the task (and they have, perhaps, been over-estimated) they are no longer as substantial as they were. Not only has the average lawyer become a less representative citizen, but a strictly legal training has become a less desirable preparation for the candid consideration of contemporary political problems.

Since 1870 the lawyer has been traveling in the same path as the business man and the politician. He has tended to become a professional specialist, and to give all his time to his specialty. The greatest and most successful American lawyers no longer become legislators and statesmen as they did in the time of Daniel Webster. They no longer obtain the experience of men and affairs which an active political life brings with it. Their professional practice, whenever they are successful, is so remunerative and so exacting that they cannot afford either the time or the money which a political career demands. The most eminent American lawyers usually remain lawyers all their lives; and if they abandon private practice at all, it is generally for the purpose of taking a seat on the Bench. Like nearly all other Americans they have found rigid specialization a condition of success.

A considerable proportion of our legislators and executives continue to be lawyers, but the difference is that now they are more likely to be less successful lawyers. Knowledge of the law and a legal habit of mind still have a great practical value in political work; and the professional politicians, who are themselves rarely men of legal training, need the services of lawyers whose legal methods are not attenuated by scruples. Lawyers of this class occupy the same relation to the local political "Bosses" as the European lawyer used to occupy in the court of the absolute monarch. He phrases the legislation which the ruler decides to be of private or public benefit; and he acts frequently as his employer's official mouthpiece and special pleader.

No doubt many excellent and even eminent lawyers continue to play an important and an honorable part in American politics. Mr. Elihu Root is a conspicuous example of a lawyer, who has sacrificed a most lucrative private practice for the purpose of giving his country the benefit of his great abilities. Mr. Taft was, of course, a lawyer before he was an administrator, though he had made no professional success corresponding to that of Mr. Root. Mr. Hughes, also, was a successful lawyer. The reform movement has brought into prominence many public-spirited lawyers, who, either as attorney-generals or as district attorneys, have sought vigorously to enforce the law and punish its violators. The lawyers, like every class of business and professional men, have felt the influence of the reforming ideas, which have become so conspicuous in American practical politics, and they have performed admirable and essential work on behalf of reform.

But it is equally true that the most prominent and thorough-going reformers, such as Roosevelt, Bryan, and Hearst, are not lawyers by profession, and that the majority of prominent American lawyers are not reformers. The tendency of the legally trained mind is inevitably and extremely conservative. So far as reform consists in the enforcement of the law, it is, of course, supported by the majority of successful lawyers; but so far as reform has come to mean a tendency to political or economic reorganization, it has to face the opposition of the bulk of American legal opinion. The existing political order has been created by lawyers; and they naturally believe somewhat obsequiously in a system for which they are responsible, and from which they benefit. This government by law, of which they boast, is not only a government by lawyers, but is a government in the interest of litigation. It makes legal advice more constantly essential to the corporation and the individual than any European political system. The lawyer, just as much as the millionaire and the politician, has reaped a bountiful harvest from the inefficiency and irresponsibility of American state governments, and from the worship of individual rights.

They have corporations in Europe, but they have nothing corresponding to the American corporation lawyer. The ablest American lawyers have been retained by the special interests. In some cases they have been retained to perform tasks which must have been repugnant to honest men; but that is not the most serious aspect of the situation. The retainer which the American legal profession has accepted from the corporations inevitably increases its natural tendency to a blind conservatism; and its influence has been used not for the purpose of extricating the large corporations from their dubious and dangerous legal situation, but for the purpose of keeping them entangled in its meshes. At a time when the public interest needs a candid reconsideration of the basis and the purpose of the American legal system, they have either opposed or contributed little to the essential work, and in adopting this course they have betrayed the interests of their more profitable clients—the large corporations themselves—whose one chance of perpetuation depends upon political and legal reconstruction.

The conservative believer in the existing American political system will doubtless reply that the lawyer, in so far as he opposes radical reform or reorganization, is merely remaining true to his function as the High Priest of American constitutional democracy. And no doubt it is begging the question at the present stage of this discussion, to assert that American lawyers as such are not so well qualified as they were to guide American political thought and action. But it can at least be maintained that, assuming some radical reorganization to be necessary, the existing prejudices, interests, and mental outlook of the American lawyer disqualify him for the task. The legal profession is risking its traditional position as the mouthpiece of the American political creed and faith upon the adequacy of the existing political system. If there is any thorough-going reorganization needed, it will be brought about in spite of the opposition of the legal profession. They occupy in relation to the modern economic and political problem a position similar to that of the Constitutional Unionists previous to the Civil War. Those estimable gentlemen believed devoutly that the Constitution, which created the problem of slavery and provoked the anti-slavery agitation, was adequate to its solution. In the same spirit learned lawyers now affirm that the existing problems can easily be solved, if only American public opinion remain faithful to the Constitution. But it may be that the Constitution, as well as the system of local political government built up around the Federal Constitution, is itself partly responsible for some of the existing abuses, evils, and problems; and if so, the American lawyer may be useful, as he was before the Civil War, in evading our difficulties; but he will not be very useful in settling them. He may try to settle them by decisions of the Supreme Court; but such decisions,—assuming, of course, that the problem is as inexorable as was that of the legal existence of slavery in a democratic nation,—such decisions would have precisely the same effect on public opinion as did the Dred Scott decision. They would merely excite a crisis, which they were intended to allay, and strengthen the hands of the more radical critics of the existing political system.

VI

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

The changes which have been taking place in industrial and political and social conditions have all tended to impair the consistency of feeling characteristic of the first phase of American national democracy. Americans are divided from one another much more than they were during the Middle Period by differences of interest, of intellectual outlook, of moral and technical standards, and of manner of life. Grave inequalities of power and deep-lying differences of purpose have developed in relation of the several primary American activities. The millionaire, the "Boss," the union laborer, and the lawyer, have all taken advantage of the loose American political organization to promote somewhat unscrupulously their own interests, and to obtain special sources of power and profit at the expense of a wholesome national balance. But the foregoing examples of specialized organization and purposes do not stand alone. They are the most conspicuous and the most troublesome because of the power wielded by those particular classes, and because they can claim for their purposes the support of certain aspects of the American national tradition. Yet the same process has been taking place in all the other departments of American social and intellectual life. Technical experts of all kinds—engineers, men of letters, and artists—have all of them been asserting much more vigorously their own special interests and purposes. In so asserting themselves they cannot claim the support of the American national democratic convention. On the contrary, the proclamation of high technical standards and of insistent individual purposes is equivalent to a revolt from the traditions of the Middle Period, which were all in favor of cheap work and the average worker. But different as is the situation of these technical experts, the fundamental meaning of their self-assertion is analogous to that of the millionaire and the "Boss." The vast incoherent mass of the American people is falling into definite social groups, which restrict and define the mental outlook and social experience of their members. The all-round man of the innocent Middle Period has become the exception. The earlier homogeneity of American society has been impaired, and no authoritative and edifying, but conscious, social ideal has as yet taken its place.

The specialized organization of American industry, politics, and labor, and the increasingly severe special discipline imposed upon the individual, are not to be considered as evils. On the contrary, they are indications of greater practical efficiency, and they contain a promise of individual moral and intellectual emancipation. But they have their serious and perilous aspects, because no sufficient provision has been made for them in the national democratic tradition. What it means is that the American nation is being confronted by a problem which the earlier national democracy expected to avoid—the social problem. By the social problem is usually meant the problem of poverty; but grave inequalities of wealth are merely the most dangerous and distressing expression of fundamental differences among the members of a society of interest and of intellectual and moral standards. In its deepest aspect, consequently, the social problem is the problem of preventing such divisions from dissolving the society into which they enter—of keeping such a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole.

In this country the solution of the social problem demands the substitution of a conscious social ideal for the earlier instinctive homogeneity of the American nation. That homogeneity has disappeared never to return. We should not want it to return, because it was dependent upon too many sacrifices of individual purpose and achievement. But a democracy cannot dispense with the solidarity which it imparted to American life, and in one way or another such solidarity must be restored. There is only one way in which it can be restored, and that is by means of a democratic social ideal, which shall give consistency to American social life, without entailing any essential sacrifice of desirable individual and class distinctions. I have used the word "restoration" to describe this binding and healing process; but the consistency which would result from the loyal realization of a comprehensive coherent democratic social ideal would differ radically from the earlier American homogeneity of feeling. The solidarity which it would impart to American society would have its basis in feeling and its results in good fellowship; but it must always remain a promise and constructive ideal rather than a finished performance. The social problem must, as long as societies continue to endure, be solved afresh by almost every generation; and the one chance of progress depends both upon an invincible loyalty to a constructive social ideal and upon a current understanding by the new generation of the actual experience of its predecessors.


CHAPTER VI

I

REFORM AND THE REFORMERS

Sensible and patriotic Americans have not, of course, tamely and ignobly submitted to the obvious evils of their political and economic condition. There was, indeed, a season when the average good American refused to take these evils seriously. He was possessed by the idea that American life was a stream, which purified itself in the running, and that reformers and critics were merely men who prevented the stream from running free. He looked upon the first spasmodic and ineffective protests with something like contempt. Reformers he appraised as busybodies, who were protesting against the conditions of success in business and politics. He nicknamed them "mugwumps" and continued to vote the regular tickets of his party. There succeeded to this phase of contemptuous dislike a few years, in which he was somewhat bewildered by the increasing evidences of corruption in American politics and lawlessness in American business methods, and during which he occasionally supported some favorite among the several reforming movements. Then a habit of criticism and reform increased with the sense that the evils were both more flagrant and more stubborn than he imagined, until at the present time average well-intentioned Americans are likely to be reformers of one kind or another, while the more intelligent and disinterested of them are pretty sure to vote a "reform" ticket. To stand for a programme of reform has become one of the recognized roads to popularity. The political leaders with the largest personal followings are some kind of reformers. They sit in presidential chairs; they occupy executive mansions; they extort legislation from unwilling politicians; they regulate and abuse the erring corporations; they are coming to control the press; and they are the most aggressive force in American public opinion. The supporters and beneficiaries of existing abuses still control much of the official and practically all the unofficial political and business machinery; but they are less domineering and self-confident than they were. The reformers have both scared and bewildered them. They begin to realize that reform has come to stay, and perhaps even to conquer, while reform itself is beginning to pay the penalty of success by being threatened with deterioration. It has had not only its hero in Theodore Roosevelt, but its specter in William R. Hearst.

In studying the course of the reforming movement during the last twenty-five years, it appears that, while reform has had a history, this history is only beginning. Since 1880, or even 1895 or 1900, it has been transformed in many significant ways. In the beginning it was spasmodic in its outbursts, innocent in its purposes, and narrow in its outlook. It sprang up almost spontaneously in a number of different places and in a number of different detached movements; and its adherents did not look much beyond a victory at a particular election, or the passage of a few remedial laws. Gradually, however, it increased in definiteness, persistence, and comprehensiveness of purpose. The reformers found the need of permanent organization, of constant work, and even within limits, of a positive programme. Their success and their influence upon public opinion increased just in proportion as they began to take their job seriously. Indeed, they have become extremely self-conscious in relation to their present standing and their future responsibilities. They are beginning to predict the most abundant results from the "uplift" movement, of which they are the leaders. They confidently anticipate that they are destined to make a much more salient and significant contribution to the history of their country than has been made by any group of political leaders since the Civil War.

It is in a sense a misnomer to write of "Reform" as a single thing. Reform is, as a matter of fact, all sorts of things. The name has been applied to a number of separate political agitations, which have been started by different people at different times in different parts of the country, and these separate movements have secured very different kinds of support, and have run very different courses. Tariff reform, for instance, was an early and popular agitation whose peculiarity has consisted in securing the support of one of the two national parties, but which in spite of that support has so far made little substantial progress. Civil service reform, on the other hand, was the first agitation looking in the direction of political purification. The early reformers believed that the eradication of the spoils system would deal a deadly blow at political corruption and professional politics. But although they have been fairly successful in establishing the "merit" system in the various public offices, the results of the reform have not equaled the promises of its advocates. While it is still an important part of the programme of reform from the point of view of many reformers, it has recently been over-shadowed by other issues. It does not provoke either as much interest as it did or as much opposition. Municipal reform has, of course, almost as many centers of agitation as there are centers of corruption—that is, large municipalities in the United States. It began as a series of local non-partisan movements for the enforcement of the laws, the dispossession of the "rascals," and the businesslike, efficient administration of municipal affairs; but the reformers discovered in many cases that municipal corruption could not be eradicated without the reform of state politics, and without some drastic purging of the local public service corporations. They have consequently in many cases enlarged the area of their agitation; but in so doing they have become divided among themselves, and their agitation has usually lost its non-partisan character. Finally the agitation against the trusts has developed a confused hodge-podge of harmless and deadly, overlapping and mutually exclusive, remedies, which are the cause of endless disagreements. Of course they are all for the People and against the Octopus, but beyond this precise and comprehensive statement of the issue, the reformers have endlessly different views about the nature of the disease and the severity of the necessary remedy.

If reform is an ambiguous and many-headed thing, the leading reformers are as far as possible from being a body of men capable of mutual coöperation. They differ almost as widely among themselves as they do from the beneficiaries or supporters of the existing abuses. William R. Hearst, William Travers Jerome, Seth Low, and George B. McClellan are all in their different ways reformers; but they would not constitute precisely a happy family. Indeed, Mr. Hearst, who in his own opinion is the only immaculate reformer, is, in the eyes of his fellow-reformers, as dangerous a public enemy as the most corrupt politician or the most unscrupulous millionaire. Any reformer who, like Mr. William Jennings Bryan, proclaims views which are in some respects more than usually radical, comes in for heartier denunciation from his brothers in reform than he does from the conservatives. Each of our leading reformers is more or less a man on horseback, who is seeking to popularize a particular brand of reform, and who is inclined to doubt whether the other brands are available for public consumption without rigid inspection. Consequently, the party of reform is broken up into a number of insurgent personalities. "The typical reformer," says the late Alfred Hodder in a book written in praise of Mr. William Travers Jerome, "The typical reformer is a 'star,' and a typical reform administration is usually a company of stars," and a most amusing piece of special pleading is the reasoning whereby the same author seeks to prove that Mr. Jerome himself is or was not a "star" performer. The preference which individual performers have shown for leading parts is in itself far from being a bad thing, but the lack of "team play" has none the less diminished the efficiency of reform as a practical and prosperous political agitation.

These disagreements are the more significant, because the different "star" reformers are sufficiently united upon their statement of fundamental principles. They all of them agree to conceive of reform as at bottom a moral protest and awakening, which seeks to enforce the violated laws and to restore the American political and economic system to its pristine purity and vigor. From their point of view certain abuses have become unwholesomely conspicuous, because the average American citizen has been a little lethargic, and allowed a few of his more energetic and unscrupulous fellow-citizens to exploit for selfish purposes the opportunities of American business and politics. The function of reform, consequently, is to deprive these parasites of their peculiar opportunities. Few reformers anticipate now that this task will be easily or quickly accomplished. They are coming to realize that the abuses are firmly intrenched, and a prolonged siege as well as constant assaults are necessary for final success. Some reformers are even tending to the opinion that a tradition of reform and succession of reformers will be demanded for the vigilant protection of the American political and economic system against abuse. But the point is the agreement among practical reformers that reform means at bottom no more than moral and political purification. It may, indeed, bring with it the necessity of a certain amount of reorganization; but such reorganization will aim merely at the improvement of the existing political and economic machinery. Present and future reformers must cleanse, oil, and patch a piece of economic and political machinery, which in all essentials is adequate to its purpose. The millionaire and the trust have appropriated too many of the economic opportunities formerly enjoyed by the people. The corrupt politician has usurped too much of the power which should be exercised by the people. Reform must restore to the people the opportunities and power of which they have been deprived.

An agitation of this kind, deriving as it does its principles and purposes from the very source of American democracy, would seem to deserve the support of all good Americans: and such support was in the beginning expected. Reformers have always tended to believe that their agitation ought to be and essentially was non-partisan. They considered it inconceivable either that patriotic American citizens should hesitate about restoring the purity and vigor of American institutions, or such an object should not appeal to every disinterested man, irrespective of party. It was a fight between the law and its violators, between the Faithful and the Heretic, between the Good and the Wicked. In such a fight there was, of course, only one aide to take. It was not to be doubted that the honest men, who constitute, of course, an enormous majority of the "plain people," would rally to the banners of reform. The rascals would be turned out; the people would regain their economic opportunities and political rights; and the American democracy would pursue undefiled its triumphant career of legalized prosperity.

These hopes have never been realized. Reform has rarely been non-partisan—except in the minds of its more innocent advocates. Now and then an agitation for municipal reform in a particular city will suffer a spasm of non-partisanship; but the reformers soon develop such lively differences among themselves, that they separate into special groups or else resume their regular party ties. Their common conception of reform as fundamentally a moral awakening, which seeks to restore the American, political and economic system to its early purity and vigor, does not help them to unity of action or to unity in the framing of a remedial policy. Different reformers really mean something very different by the traditional system, from which American practice has departed and which they propose to restore. Some of them mean thereby a condition of spiritual excellence, which will be restored by a sort of politico-moral revivalism and which will somehow make the results of divine and popular election coincide. Others mean nothing more than the rigid enforcement of existing laws. Still others mean a new legal expression of the traditional democratic principle, framed to meet the new political and social conditions; but the reformers who agree upon this last conception of reform disagree radically as to what the new legal expression should be. The traditional system, which they seek to restore, assumes almost as many shapes as there are leading reformers; and as the reforming movement develops, the disagreements among the reformers become more instead of less definite and acute.

The inability of the reformers to coöperate in action or to agree as to the application of their principles is in part merely a natural result of their essential work. Reformers are primarily protestants; and protestants are naturally insubordinate. They have been protesting against the established order in American business and politics. Their protest implies a certain degree of moral and intellectual independence, which makes them dislike to surrender or subordinate their own personal opinions and manner of action. Such independence is a new and refreshing thing, which has suddenly made American politics much more interesting and significant than it has been at any time since the Civil War. It has a high value wholly apart from its immediate political results. It means that the American people are beginning a new phase of their political experience,—a phase in which there will be room for a much freer play of individual ability and character. Inevitably the sudden realization by certain exceptional politicians that they have a right to be individuals, and that they can take a strong line of their own in politics without being disqualified for practical political association with their fellow-countrymen—such a new light could hardly break without tempting the performers to over-play the part. The fact that they have over-played their parts, and have wasted time and energy over meaningless and unnecessary disagreements is not in itself a matter of much importance. The great majority of them are disinterested and patriotic men, who will not allow in the long run either personal ambition or political crotchets to prevent them from coöperating for the good of the cause.

Unfortunately, however, neither public spirit nor patriotism will be sufficient to bring them effectively together—any more than genuine excellence of intention and real public spirit enabled patriotic Americans to coöperate upon a remedial policy during the years immediately preceding the Civil War. The plain fact is that the traditional American political system, which so many good reformers wish to restore by some sort of reforming revivalism, is just as much responsible for the existing political and economic abuses as the Constitution was responsible for the evil of slavery. As long, consequently, as reform is considered to be a species of higher conservatism, the existing abuses can no more be frankly faced and fully understood than the Whig leaders were able to face and understand the full meaning and consequences of any attempt on the part of a democracy to keep house with slavery. The first condition of a better understanding and a more efficient coöperation among the reforming leaders is a better understanding of the meaning of reform and the function of reformers. They will never be united on the basis of allegiance to the traditional American political creed, because that creed itself is overflowing with inconsistencies and ambiguities, which afford a footing for almost every extreme of radicalism and conservatism; and in case they persist in the attempt to reform political and economic abuses merely by a restoration of earlier conditions and methods, they will be compromising much that is good in the present economic and political organization without recovering that which was good in the past.

II

THE LOGIC OF REFORM

The prevailing preconception of the reformers, that the existing evils and abuses have been due chiefly to the energy and lack of scruple with which business men and politicians have taken advantage of the good but easy-going American, and that a general increase of moral energy, assisted by some minor legal changes, will restore the balance,—such a conception of the situation is less than half true. No doubt, the "plain people" of the United States have been morally indifferent, and have allowed unscrupulous special interests to usurp too much power; but that is far from being the whole story. The unscrupulous energy of the "Boss" or the "tainted" millionaire is vitally related to the moral indifference of the "plain people." Both of them have been encouraged to believe by the nature of our traditional ideas and institutions that a man could be patriotic without being either public-spirited or disinterested. The democratic state has been conceived as a piece of political machinery, which existed for the purpose of securing certain individual rights and opportunities—the expectation being that the greatest individual happiness would be thereby promoted, and one which harmonized with the public interest. Consequently when the "Boss" and the "tainted" millionaire took advantage of this situation to secure for themselves an unusually large amount of political and economic power, they were putting into practice an idea which traditionally had been entirely respectable, and which during the pioneer period had not worked badly. On the other hand, when, the mass of American voters failed to detect the danger of such usurpation until it had gone altogether too far, they, too, were not without warrant for their lethargy and callousness. They, too, in a smaller way had considered the American political and economic system chiefly as a system framed for their individual benefit, and it did not seem sportsmanlike to turn and rend their more successful competitors, until they were told that the "trusts" and the "Bosses" were violating the sacred principle of equal rights. Thus the abuses of which we are complaining are not weeds which have been allowed to spring up from neglect, and which can be eradicated by a man with a hoe. They are cultivated plants, which, if not precisely specified in the plan of the American political and economic garden, have at least been encouraged by traditional methods of cultivation.

The fact that this dangerous usurpation of power has been accomplished partly by illegal methods has blinded many reformers to two considerations, which have a vital relation to both the theory and the practice of reform. Violation of the law was itself partly the result of conflicting and unwise state legislation, and for this reason did not seem very heinous either to its perpetrators or to public opinion. But even if the law had not been violated, similar results would have followed. Under the traditional American system, with the freedom permitted to the individual, with the restriction placed on the central authority, and with its assumption of a substantial identity between the individual and the public interest—under such a system unusually energetic and unscrupulous men were bound to seize a kind and an amount of political and economic power which was not entirely wholesome. They had a license to do so; and if they had failed to take advantage thereof, their failure would have been an indication, not of disinterestedness or moral impeccability, but of sheer weakness and inefficiency.

How utterly confusing it is, consequently, to consider reform as equivalent merely to the restoration of the American democracy to a former condition of purity and excellence! Our earlier political and economic condition was not at its best a fit subject for any great amount of complacency. It cannot be restored, even if we would; and the public interest has nothing to gain by its restoration. The usurpation of power by "trusts" and "Bosses" is more than anything else an expression of a desirable individual initiative and organizing ability—which have been allowed to become dangerous and partly corrupt, because of the incoherence and the lack of purpose and responsibility in the traditional American political and economic system. A "purification" might well destroy the good with the evil; and even if it were successful in eradicating certain abuses, would only prepare the way for the outbreak in another form of the tendency towards individual aggrandizement and social classification. No amount of moral energy, directed merely towards the enforcement of the laws, can possibly avail to accomplish any genuine or lasting reform. It is the laws themselves which are partly at fault, and still more at fault is the group of ideas and traditional practices behind the laws.

Reformers have failed for the most part to reach a correct diagnosis of existing political and economic abuses, because they are almost as much the victim of perverted, confused, and routine habits of political thought as is the ordinary politician. They have eschewed the tradition of partisan conformity in reference to controverted political questions, but they have not eschewed a still more insidious tradition of conformity—the tradition that a patriotic American citizen must not in his political thinking go beyond the formulas consecrated in the sacred American writings. They adhere to the stupefying rule that the good Fathers of the Republic relieved their children from the necessity of vigorous, independent, or consistent thinking in political matters,—that it is the duty of their loyal children to repeat the sacred words and then await a miraculous consummation of individual and social prosperity. Accordingly, all the leading reformers begin by piously reiterating certain phrases about equal rights for all and special privileges for none, and of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Having in this way proved their fundamental political orthodoxy, they proceed to interpret the phrases according to their personal, class, local, and partisan preconceptions and interests. They have never stopped to inquire whether the principle of equal rights in its actual embodiment in American institutional and political practice has not been partly responsible for some of the existing abuses, whether it is either a safe or sufficient platform for a reforming movement, and whether its continued proclamation as the fundamental political principle of a democracy will help or hinder the higher democratic consummation. Their unquestioning orthodoxy in this respect has made them faithless both to their own personal interest as reformers and to the cause of reform. Reform exclusively as a moral protest and awakening is condemned to sterility. Reformers exclusively as moral protestants and purifiers are condemned to misdirected effort, to an illiberal puritanism, and to personal self-stultification. Reform must necessarily mean an intellectual as well as a moral challenge; and its higher purposes will never be accomplished unless it is accompanied by a masterful and jubilant intellectual awakening.

All Americans, whether they are professional politicians or reformer, "predatory" millionaires or common people, political philosophers or schoolboys, accept the principle of "equal rights for all and special privileges for none" as the absolutely sufficient rule of an American democratic political system. The platforms of both parties testify on its behalf. Corporation lawyers and their clients appear frequently to believe in it. Tammany offers tribute to it during every local political campaign in New York. A Democratic Senator, in the intervals between his votes for increased duties on the products of his state, declares it to be the summary of all political wisdom. The fact that Mr. Bryan incorporates it in most of his speeches does not prevent Mr. Hearst from keeping it standing in type for the purpose of showing how very American the American can be. The fact that Mr. Hearst has appropriated it with the American flag as belonging peculiarly to himself has not prevented Mr. Roosevelt from explaining the whole of his policy of reform as at the bottom an attempt to restore a "Square Deal"—that is, a condition of equal rights and non-existing privileges. More radical reformers find the same principle equally useful for their own purposes. Mr. Frederic C. Howe, in his "Hope of Democracy," bases an elaborate scheme of municipal socialism exclusively upon it. Mr. William Smythe, in his "Constructive Democracy," finds warrant in the same principle for the immediate purchase by the central government of the railway and "trust" franchises. Mr. Henry George, Jr., in his "Menace of Privilege," asserts that the plain American citizen can never enjoy equality of rights as long as land, mines, railroad rights of way and terminals, and the like remain in the hands of private owners. The collectivist socialists are no less certain that the institution of private property necessarily gives some men an unjust advantage over others. There is no extreme of radicalism or conservatism, of individualism or socialism, of Republicanism or Democracy, which does not rest its argument on this one consummate principle.

In this respect, the good American finds himself in a situation similar to that with which he was confronted before the Civil War. At that time, also, Abolitionist and slave-holder, Republican and pioneer Democrat, each of them declared himself to be the interpreter of the true democratic doctrine; and no substantial progress could be made towards the settlement of the question, until public opinion had been instructed as to the real meaning of democracy in relation to the double-headed problem of slavery and states' rights. It required the utmost intellectual courage and ability to emancipate the conception of democracy from the illusions and confusions of thought which enabled Davis, Douglas, and Garrison all to pose as impeccable democrats; and at the present time reformers need to devote as much ability and more courage to the task of framing a fitting creed for a reformed and reforming American democracy.

The political lessons of the anti-slavery and states' rights discussions may not be of much obvious assistance in thinking out such a creed; but they should at least help the reformers to understand the methods whereby the purposes of a reformed democracy can be achieved. No progress was made towards the solution of the slavery question until the question itself was admitted to be national in scope, and its solution a national responsibility. No substantial progress had been made in the direction of reform until it began to be understood that here, also, a national responsibility existed, which demanded an exercise of the powers of the central government. Reform is both meaningless and powerless unless the Jeffersonian principle of non-interference is abandoned. The experience of the last generation plainly shows that the American economic and social system cannot be allowed to take care of itself, and that the automatic harmony of the individual and the public interest, which is the essence of the Jeffersonian democratic creed, has proved to be an illusion. Interference with the natural course of individual and popular action there must be in the public interest; and such interference must at least be sufficient to accomplish its purposes. The house of the American democracy is again by way of being divided against itself, because the national interest has not been consistently asserted as against special and local interests; and again, also, it can be reunited only by being partly reconstructed on better foundations. If reform does not and cannot mean restoration, it is bound to mean reconstruction.

The reformers have come partly to realize that the Jeffersonian policy of drift must be abandoned. They no longer expect the American ship of state by virtue of its own righteous framework to sail away to a safe harbor in the Promised Land. They understand that there must be a vigorous and conscious assertion of the public as opposed to private and special interests, and that the American people must to a greater extent than they have in the past subordinate the latter to the former. They behave as if the American ship of state will hereafter require careful steering; and a turn or two at the wheel has given them some idea of the course they must set. On the other hand, even the best of them have not learned the name of its ultimate destination, the full difficulties of the navigation, or the stern discipline which may eventually be imposed upon the ship's crew. They do not realize, that is, how thoroughly Jeffersonian individualism must be abandoned for the benefit of a genuinely individual and social consummation; and they do not realize how dangerous and fallacious a chart their cherished principle of equal rights may well become. In reviving the practice of vigorous national action for the achievement of a national purpose, the better reformers have, if they only knew it, been looking in the direction of a much more trustworthy and serviceable political principle. The assumption of such a responsibility implies the rejection of a large part of the Jeffersonian creed, and a renewed attempt to establish in its place the popularity of its Hamiltonian rival. On the other hand, it involves no less surely the transformation of Hamiltonianism into a thoroughly democratic political principle. None of these inferences have, however, as yet been generally drawn, and no leading reformer has sought to give reform its necessary foundation of positive, political principle.

Only a very innocent person will expect reformers to be convinced of such a novel notion of reform by mere assertion, no matter how emphatic, or by argument, no matter how conclusive. But if, as I have said, reform actually implies a criticism of traditional American ideas, and a more responsible and more positive conception of democracy, these implications will necessarily be revealed in the future history of the reforming agitation. The reformers who understand will be assisted by the logic of events, whereas those who cannot and will not understand will be thwarted by the logic of events. Gradually (it may be anticipated) reformers, who dare to criticise and who are not afraid to reconstruct will be sharply distinguished from reformers who believe reform to be a species of higher conservatism. The latter will be forced where they belong into the ranks of the supporters and beneficiaries of the existing system; and the party of genuine reform will be strengthened by their departure. On the other hand, the sincere and thorough-going reformers can hardly avoid a division into two divergent groups. One of these groups will stick faithfully to the principle of equal rights and to the spirit of the true Jeffersonian faith. It will seek still further to undermine the representative character of American institutions, to deprive official leadership of any genuine responsibility, and to cultivate individualism at the expense of individual and national integrity. The second group, on the other hand, may learn from experience that the principle of equal rights is a dangerous weapon in the hands of factious and merely revolutionary agitators, and even that such a principle is only a partial and poverty-stricken statement of the purpose of a democratic polity. The logic of its purposes will compel it to favor the principle of responsible representative government, and it will seek to forge institutions which will endow responsible political government with renewed life. Above all, it may discover that the attempt to unite the Hamiltonian principle of national political responsibility and efficiency with a frank democratic purpose will give a new meaning to the Hamiltonian system of political ideas and a new power to democracy.

III

WILLIAM J. BRYAN AS A REFORMER

One would hardly dare to assert that such a future for the reforming agitation is already prophesied by the history of reform; but the divergence between different classes of the reformers is certainly widening, and some such alignment can already be distinguished. Hitherto I have been classing reformers together and have been occupied in pointing out the merits and failings which they possess in common. Such a method of treatment hardly does justice to the significance of their mutual disagreements, or to the individual value of their several personalities and points of view. In many instances their disagreements are meaningless, and are not the result of any genuine conviction; but in other instances they do represent a relevant and significant conflict of ideas. It remains to be seen, consequently, what can be made out of their differences of opinion and policy, and whether they point in the direction of a gradual transformation of the agitation for reform. For this purpose I shall select a number of leading reformers whose work has been most important, and whose individual opinions are most significant, and seek some sort of an appraisal both of the comparative value of their work and of the promise of their characteristic ideas. The men who naturally suggest themselves for this purpose are William J. Bryan, William Travers Jerome, William Randolph Hearst, and Theodore Roosevelt. Each of these gentlemen throughout his public life has consistently stood for reform of one kind or another; and together they include almost every popular brand or phase thereof. Reform as a practical agitation is pretty well exhausted by the points of view of these four gentlemen. They exhibit its weakness and its strength, its illusions and its good intentions, its dangerous and its salutary tendencies.

Be it remarked at the outset that three of these gentlemen call themselves Democrats, while the fourth has been the official leader of the Republican party. The distinction to be made on this ground is sufficiently obvious, but it is also extremely important. The three Democrats differ among themselves in certain very important respects, and these differences will receive their full share of attention. Nevertheless the fact that under ordinary circumstances they affiliate with the Democratic party and accept its traditions gives them certain common characteristics, and (it must be added) subjects them to certain common disabilities. On the other hand the fact that Theodore Roosevelt, although a reformer from the very beginning of his public life, has resolutely adhered to the Republican partisan organization and has accepted its peculiar traditions,—this fact, also, has largely determined the character and the limits of his work. These limits are plainly revealed in the opinions, the public policy, and the public action of the four typical reformers; and attempt to appraise the value of their individual opinions and their personalities must be constantly checked by a careful consideration of the advantages or disadvantages which they have enjoyed or suffered from their partisan ties.

Mr. William J. Bryan is a fine figure of a man—amiable, winning, disinterested, courageous, enthusiastic, genuinely patriotic, and after a fashion liberal in spirit. Although he hails from Nebraska, he is in temperament a Democrat of the Middle Period—a Democrat of the days when organization in business and politics did not count for as much as it does to-day, and when excellent intentions and noble sentiments embodied in big flowing words were the popular currency of American democracy. But while an old-fashioned Democrat in temperament, he has become in ideas a curious mixture of traditional democracy and modern Western radicalism; and he can, perhaps, be best understood as a Democrat of both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tendencies, who has been born a few generations too late. He is honestly seeking to deal with contemporary American political problems in the spirit, if not according to the letter, of traditional democracy; but though he is making a gallant fight and a brave show, his efforts are not being rewarded with any conspicuous measure of success.

Mr. Bryan has always been a reformer, but his programme of reform has always been ill conceived. His first conspicuous appearance in public life in the Democratic Convention of 1806 was occasioned by the acute and widespread economic distress among his own people west of the Mississippi; and the means whereby he sought to remedy that distress, viz. by a change in the currency system, which would enable the Western debtors partly to repudiate their debts, was a genuine result of Jacksonian economic ideas. The Jacksonian Democracy, being the product of agricultural life, and being inexperienced in the complicated business of finance, has always relished financial heresies. Bryan's first campaign was, consequently, a new assertion of a time-honored tendency of his party; and in other respects, also, he exhibited a lingering fealty to its older traditions. Reformer though he be, he has never been much interested in civil service reform, or in any agitations looking in the direction of the diminution of the influence of the professional politician. The reforms for which he has stood have been economic, and he has had little sympathy with any thorough-going attempt to disturb even such an equivocally Democratic institution as the spoils system. Yet his lack of sympathy with this aspect of reform was not due to any preference for corruption. It must be traced to a persistence of the old Democratic prejudice that administrative specialization, like other kinds of expert service, implied a discrimination against the average Democrat.

After the revival of prosperity among his own people had shown that partial repudiation was not the only cure for poverty, Mr. Bryan fought his second campaign chiefly on the issue of imperialism, and again met with defeat. But in this instance his platform was influenced more by Jeffersonian than Jacksonian ideas. The Jacksonian Democracy had always been expansionist in disposition and policy, and under the influence of their nationalism they had lost interest in Jefferson's humanitarianism. In this matter, however, Mr. Bryan has shown more sympathy with the first than with the second phase of the Democratic tradition; and in making this choice he was undoubtedly more faithful to the spirit and the letter of the Democratic creed than were the expansionist Democrats of the Middle Period. The traditional American democracy has frequently been national in feeling, but it has never been national in idea and purpose. In the campaign of 1900 Mr. Bryan committed himself and his party to an anti-national point of view; and no matter how well intentioned and consistent he was in so doing, he made a second mistake, even more disastrous than the first. In seeking to prevent his countrymen from asserting their national interest beyond their own continent, he was also opposing in effect the resolute assertion of the national interest in domestic affairs. He stamped himself, that is, as an anti-nationalist, and his anti-nationalism has disqualified him for effective leadership of the party of reform.

Mr. Bryan's anti-nationalism is peculiarly embarrassing to his political efficiency just because he is, as I have indicated, in many of his ideas an advanced contemporary radical. He is, indeed, more of a radical than any other political leader of similar prominence; and his radicalism is the result of a sincere and a candid attempt to think out a satisfactory solution of the contemporary economic and political problems. As a result of these reflections he dared to advocate openly and unequivocally the public ownership of the railway system of the country; and he has proposed, also, a measure of Federal regulation of corporations, conducting an inter-state business, much more drastic than that of Mr. Roosevelt. These proposed increases of Federal responsibility and power would have been considered outrageous by an old-fashioned Democrat; and they indicate on the part of Mr. Bryan an unusually liberal and courageous mind. But the value and effect of his radicalism is seriously impaired by the manner in which it is qualified. He proposes in one breath enormous increases of Federal power and responsibility, and in the next betrays the old Democratic distrust of effective national organization. He is willing to grant power to the Federal authorities, but he denies them any confidence, because of the democratic tradition of an essential conflict between political authority, particularly so far as it is centralized, and the popular interest. He is incapable of adapting his general political theories to his actual political programme; and, consequently, the utmost personal enthusiasm on his part and great power of effective political agitation cannot give essential coherence, substantial integrity, or triumphant effect to his campaigns.

The incoherence of his political thinking is best exemplified by the way in which he proposed to nationalize the American railway system. His advocacy of public ownership was the most courageous act of his political career; but he soon showed that he was prepared neither to insist upon such a policy nor even to carry it to a logical conclusion. Almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he became horrified at his own audacity and sought to mitigate its effects. He admitted that the centralization of so much power was dangerous, and he sought to make these dangers less by proposing that the states appropriate the railroads operating within the boundaries of one state, and the central government, only the large inter-state systems. But this qualification destroyed the effect of his Federalist audacity. The inter-state railroads constitute such an enormous percentage of the total mileage of the country that if centralized governmental control was dangerous for all the railroads of the country, it would be almost equally dangerous for that proportion of the railway mileage operated as part of inter-state systems. In the one and the same speech, that is, Mr. Bryan placed himself on record as a radical centralizer of economic and political power and as a man who was on general principles afraid of centralization and opposed to it. No wonder public opinion did not take his proposal seriously, and no wonder he himself has gradually dropped it out of his practical programme.

The confusion and inconsistency of Mr. Bryan's own thinking is merely the reflection of the confusion and inconsistency resident in the creed of his party. It is particularly conspicuous in his case, because he is, as I have intimated, a sincere and within limits a candid thinker; but Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats alike have always distrusted and condemned the means whereby alone the underlying purposes of democracy can be fulfilled. Mr. Bryan is in no respect more genuinely Democratic than in his incoherence. The remedial policy which he proposes for the ills of the American political body are meaningless, unless sustained by faith in the ability of the national political organization to promote the national welfare. His needs for the success and integrity of his own policy a conviction which his traditions prevent him from entertaining. He is possessed by the time-honored Democratic dislike of organization and of the faith in expert skill, in specialized training, and in large personal opportunities and responsibilities which are implied by a trust in organization. Of course he himself would deny that he was the enemy of anything which made towards human betterment, for it is characteristic of the old-fashioned Democrats verbally to side with the angels, but at the same time to insist on clipping their wings. His fundamental prejudice against efficient organization and personal independence is plainly betrayed by his opinions in relation to institutional reform—which are absolutely those of a Democrat of the Middle Period. He is on record in favor of destroying the independence of the Federal judiciary by making it elective, of diminishing the authority of the President by allowing him only a suspensive veto on legislation, and of converting representative assemblies into a machinery, like that of the old French Parliaments, for merely registering the Sovereign will. Faith in the people and confidence in popular government means to Mr. Bryan an utter lack of faith in those personal instruments whereby such rule can be endowed with foresight, moderation, and direction. Confidence in the average man, that is, means to him distrust in the exceptional man, or in any sort of organization which bestows on the exceptional man an opportunity equal to his ability and equipment. He stands for the sacrifice of the individual to the popular average; and the perpetuation of such a sacrifice would mean ultimate democratic degeneration.

IV

WILLIAM TRAVERS JEROME AS A REFORMER

Mr. William Travers Jerome has not so assured a rank in the hierarchy of reformers as he had a few years ago, but his work and his point of view remain typical and significant. Unlike Mr. Bryan, he is in temperament and sympathies far from being an old-fashioned Democrat. He is, as his official expositor, the late Mr. Alfred Hodder, says, "a typical American of the new time." No old-fashioned Democrat would have smoked cigarettes, tossed dice in public for drinks, and "handed out" slang to his constituents; and his unconventionally in these respects is merely an occasional expression of a novel, individual, and refreshing point of view. Mr. Jerome alone among American politicians has made a specialty of plain speaking. He has revolted against the tradition in our politics which seeks to stop every leak with a good intention and plaster every sore with a "decorative phrase." He has, says Mr. Hodder, "a partly Gallic passion for intellectual veracity, for a clear recognition of the facts before him, however ugly, and a wholly Gallic hatred of hypocrisy." It is Mr. Jerome's intellectual veracity, his somewhat conscious and strenuous ideal of plain speaking, which has been his personal contribution to the cause of reform; and he is right in believing it to be a very important contribution. The effective work of reform, as has already been pointed out, demands on the part of its leaders the intellectual virtues of candor, consistency, and a clear recognition of facts. In Mr. Jerome's own case his candor and his clear recognition of facts have been used almost exclusively in the field of municipal reform. He has vigorously protested against existing laws which have been passed in obedience to a rigorous puritanism, which, because of their defiance of stubborn facts, can scarcely be enforced, and whose statutory existence merely provides an opportunity for the "grafter." He has clearly discerned that in seeking the amendment of such laws he is obliged to fight, not merely an unwise statute, but an erroneous, superficial, and hypocritical state of mind. Although it may have been his own official duty as district attorney to see that certain laws are enforced and to prosecute the law breakers, he fully realizes that municipal reform at least will never attain its ends until the public—the respectable, well-to-do, church-going public—is converted to an abandonment of what Mr. Hodder calls administrative lying. Consequently his intellectual candor is more than a personal peculiarity—more even than an extremely effective method of popular agitation. It is the expression of a deeper aspect of reform, which many respectable reformers, not merely ignore, but fear and reprobate,—an aspect of reform which can never prevail until the reformers themselves are subjected to a process of purgation and education.

It has happened, however, that Mr. Jerome's reputation and successes have been won in the field of local politics; and, unfortunately, as soon as he transgressed the boundaries of that field, he lost his efficiency, his insight, and, to my mind, his interest. Only a year after he was elected to the district attorneyship of New York County, in spite of the opposition both of Tammany and William R. Hearst, he offered himself as a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination of New York on the comprehensive platform of his oath of office; but in the larger arena his tactics proved to be ineffective, and his recent popularity of small avail. He cut no figure at all in the convention, and a very insignificant one outside. Neither was there any reason to be surprised at this result. In municipal politics he stood for an ideal and a method of agitation which was both individual and of great value. In state and national politics he stood for nothing individual, for nothing of peculiar value, for no specific group of ideas or scheme of policy. The announcement that a candidate's platform consists of his oath of office doubtless has a full persuasive sound to many Americans; but it was none the less on Mr. Jerome's part an inept and meaningless performance. He was bidding for support merely on the ground that he was an honest man who proposed to keep his word; but honesty and good faith are qualities which the public have a right to take for granted in their officials, and no candidate can lay peculiar claim to them without becoming politically sanctimonious. Mr. Hearst's strength consisted in the fact that he had for years stood for a particular group of ideas and a particular attitude of mind towards the problems of state and national politics, while Mr. Jerome's weakness consisted in the fact that he had never really tried to lead public opinion in relation to state and national political problems, and that he was obliged to claim support on the score of personal moral superiority to his opponent. The moral superiority may be admitted; but alone it never would and never should contribute to his election. In times like these a reformer must identify a particular group of remedial measures with his public personality. The public has a right to know in what definite ways a reformer's righteousness is to be made effective; and Mr. Jerome has never taken any vigorous and novel line in relation to the problems of state and national politics. When he speaks on those subjects, he loses his vivacity, and betrays in his thinking a tendency to old-fashioned Democracy far beyond that of Mr. Bryan. He becomes in his opinions eminently respectable and tolerably dull, which is, as the late Mr. Alfred Hodder could have told him, quite out of keeping with the part of a "New American."

Mr. Jerome has never given the smallest evidence of having taken serious independent thought on our fundamental political problems. In certain points of detail respecting general political questions he has shown a refreshing freedom from conventional illusions; but, so far as I know, no public word has ever escaped him, which indicates that he has applied his "ideal of intellectual veracity," "his Gallic instinct for consistency," to the creed of his own party. When confronted by the fabric of traditional Jeffersonian Democracy, his mind, like that of so many other Democrats, is immediately lulled into repose. In one of his speeches, for instance, he has referred to his party as essentially the party of "liberal ideas," and he was much praised by the anti-Hearst newspapers for this consoling description; but it can hardly be considered as an illustration of Mr. Jerome's "intellectual veracity." If by "liberal ideas" one means economic and political heresies, such as nullification, "squatter" sovereignty, secession, free silver, and occasional projects of repudiation, then, indeed, the Democracy has been a party of "liberal ideas." But heresies of this kind are not the expression of liberal thought; they are the result of various phases of local political and economic discontent. When a group of Democrats become "liberal," it usually means that they are doing a bad business, or are suffering from a real or supposed injury. But if by "liberal" we mean, not merely radical and subversive, but progressive national ideas, the application of the adjective to the Democratic party is attended with certain difficulties. In the course of American history what measure of legislation expressive of a progressive national idea can be attributed to the Democratic party? At times it has been possessed by certain revolutionary tendencies; at other times it has been steeped in Bourbon conservatism. At present it is alternating between one and the other, according to the needs and opportunities of the immediate political situation. It is trying to find room within its hospitable folds for both Alton B. Parker and William J. Bryan, and it has such an appetite for inconsistencies that it may succeed. But in that event one would expect some symptoms of uneasiness on the part of a Democratic reformer with "Gallic clearness and consistency of mind, with an instinct for consistency, and a hatred of hypocrisy."

V

WILLIAM R. HEARST AS A REFORMER

The truth is that Mr. William R. Hearst offers his countrymen a fair expression of the kind of "liberal ideas" proper to the creed of democracy. In respect to patriotism and personal character Mr. Bryan is a better example of the representative Democrat than is Mr. Hearst; but in the tendency and spirit of his agitation for reform Hearst more completely reveals the true nature of Democratic "liberalism." When Mr. Lincoln Steffens asserts on the authority of the "man of mystery" himself that one of Hearst's mysterious actions has been a profound and searching study of Jeffersonian doctrine, I can almost bring myself to believe the assertion. The radicalism of Hearst is simply an unscrupulous expression of the radical element in the Jeffersonian tradition. He bases his whole agitation upon the sacred idea of equal rights for all and special privileges for none, and he indignantly disclaims the taint of socialism. His specific remedial proposals do not differ essentially from those of Mr. Bryan. His methods of agitation and his popular catch words are an ingenious adaptation of Jefferson to the needs of political "yellow journalism." He is always an advocate of the popular fact. He always detests the unpopular word. He approves expansion, but abhors imperialism. He welcomes any opportunity for war, but execrates militarism. He wants the Federal government to crush the trusts by the most drastic legislation, but he is opposed to centralization. The institutional reforms which he favors all of them look in the direction of destroying what remains of judicial, executive, or legislative independence. The whole programme is as incoherent as is that of Mr. Bryan; but incoherence is the least of his faults. Mr. Bryan's inconsistencies are partly redeemed by his genuine patriotism. The distracting effect of Hearst's inconsistencies is intensified by his factiousness. He is more and less than a radical. He is in temper a revolutionist. The disgust and distrust which he excites is the issue of a wholesome political and social instinct, for the political instincts of the American people are often much sounder than their ideas. Hearst and Hearstism is a living menace to the orderly process of reform and to American national integrity.

Hearst is revolutionary in spirit, because the principle of equal rights itself, in the hand either of a fanatic or a demagogue, can be converted into a revolutionary principle. He considers, as do all reformers, the prevalent inequalities of economic and political power to be violations of that principle. He also believes in the truth of American political individualism, and in the adequacy, except in certain minor respects, of our systems of inherited institutions. How, then, did these inequalities come about? How did the Democratic political system of Jefferson and Jackson issue in undemocratic inequalities? The answer is obviously (and it is an answer drawn by other reformers) that these inequalities are the work of wicked and unscrupulous men. Financial or political pirates of one kind or another have been preying on the guileless public, and by means of their aggressions have perversely violated the supreme law of equal rights. These men must be exposed; they must be denounced as enemies of the people; they must be held up to public execration and scorn; they must become the objects of a righteous popular vengeance. Such are the feelings and ideas which possess the followers of Hearst, and on the basis of which Hearst himself acts and talks. An apparent justification is reached for a systematic vilification of the trusts, the "predatory" millionaires and their supporters; and such vilification has become Hearst's peculiar stock in trade. In effect he treats his opponents very much as the French revolutionary leaders treated their opponents, so that in case the conflict should become still more embittered, his "reformed" democracy may resemble the purified republic of which Robespierre and St. Just dreamed when they sent Desmoulins and Danton to the guillotine. When he embodies such ideas and betrays such a spirit, the disputed point as to Hearst's sincerity sinks into insignificance. A fanatic sincerely possessed by these ideas is a more dangerous menace to American national integrity and the Promise of American democracy than the sheerest demagogue.

The logic of Hearst's agitation is analogous to the logic of the anti-slavery agitation in 1830, and Hearstism is merely Abolitionism applied to a new material and translated into rowdy journalism. The Abolitionists, believing as they did, that the institution of slavery violated an abstract principle of political justice, felt thereby fully authorized to vilify the Southern slaveholders as far as the resources of the English language would permit. They attempted to remedy one injustice by committing another injustice; and by the violence of their methods they almost succeeded in tearing apart the good fabric of our national life. Hearst is headed in precisely the same direction. He is doing a radical injustice to a large body of respectable American citizens who, like Hearst himself, have merely shown a certain lack of scruple in taking advantage of the opportunities which the American political and economic system offers, and who have been distinguished rather by peculiar ability and energy than by peculiar selfishness. On a rigid interpretation of the principle of equal rights he may be justified in holding them up to public execration, just as the Abolitionists, on the principle that the right to freedom was a Divine law, might be justified in vilifying the Southerners. But as a matter of fact we know that personally neither the millionaire nor the slave-holder deserves such denunciation; and we ought to know that the prejudices and passions provoked by language of this kind violate the essential principle both of nationality and democracy. The foundation of nationality is mutual confidence and fair dealing, and the aim of democracy is a better quality of human nature effected by a higher type of human association. Hearstism, like Abolitionism, is the work of unbalanced and vindictive men, and increases enormously the difficulty of the wise and effective cure of the contemporary evils.

Yet Hearst, as little as the millionaires he denounces, is not entirely responsible for himself. Such a responsibility would be too heavy for the shoulders of one man. He has been given to the American people for their sins in politics and economics. His opponents may scold him as much as they please. They may call him a demagogue and a charlatan; they may accuse him of corrupting the public mind and pandering to degrading passions; they may declare that his abusive attacks on the late Mr. McKinley were at least indirectly the cause of that gentleman's assassination; they may, in short, behave and talk as if he were a much more dangerous public enemy than the most "tainted" millionaire or the most corrupt politician. Nevertheless they cannot deprive him or his imitators of the standing to be obtained from the proclamation of a rigorous interpretation of the principle of equal rights. Hearst has understood that principle better than the other reformers, or the conservatives who claim its authority. He has exhibited its disintegrating and revolutionary implications; and he has convinced a large, though fluctuating, following that he is only fighting for justice. He personally may or may not have run his course, but it is manifest that his peculiar application of the principle of equal rights to our contemporary economic and political problems has come to stay. As long as that principle keeps its present high position in the hierarchy of American political ideas, just so long will it afford authority and countenance to agitators like Hearst. He is not a passing danger, which will disappear in case the truly Herculean efforts to discredit him personally continue to be successful. Just as slavery was the ghost in the House of the American Democracy during the Middle Period, so Hearstism is and will remain the ghost in the House of Reform. And the incantation by which it will be permanently exorcised has not yet been publicly phrased.

VI

THEODORE ROOSEVELT AS A REFORMER

It is fortunate, consequently, that one reformer can be named whose work has tended to give reform the dignity of a constructive mission. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt's behavior at least is not dictated by negative conception of reform. During the course of an extremely active and varied political career he has, indeed, been all kinds of a reformer. His first appearance in public life, as a member of the Legislature of New York, coincided with an outbreak of dissatisfaction over the charter of New York City; and Mr. Roosevelt's name was identified with the bills which began the revision of that very much revised instrument. Somewhat later, as one of the Federal Commissioners, Mr. Roosevelt made a most useful contribution to the more effective enforcement of the Civil Service Law. Still later, as Police Commissioner of New York City, he had his experience of reform by means of unregenerate instruments and administrative lies. Then, as Governor of the State of New York, he was instrumental in securing the passage of a law taxing franchises as real property and thus faced for the first time and in a preliminary way the many-headed problem of the trusts. Finally, when an accident placed him in the Presidential chair, he consistently used the power of the Federal government and his own influence and popularity for the purpose of regulating the corporations in what he believed to be the public interest. No other American has had anything like so varied and so intimate an acquaintance with the practical work of reform as has Mr. Roosevelt; and when, after more than twenty years of such experience, he adds to the work of administrative reform the additional task of political and economic reconstruction, his originality cannot be considered the result of innocence. Mr. Roosevelt's reconstructive policy does not go very far in purpose or achievement, but limited as it is, it does tend to give the agitation for reform the benefit of a much more positive significance and a much more dignified task.

Mr. Roosevelt has imparted a higher and more positive significance to reform, because throughout his career he has consistently stood for an idea, from which the idea of reform cannot be separated—namely, the national idea. He has, indeed, been even more of a nationalist than he has a reformer. His most important literary work was a history of the beginning of American national expansion. He has treated all public questions from a vigorous, even from an extreme, national standpoint. No American politician was more eager to assert the national interest against an actual or a possible foreign enemy; and not even William R. Hearst was more resolute to involve his country in a war with Spain. Fortunately, however, his aggressive nationalism did not, like that of so many other statesmen, faint from exhaustion as soon as there were no more foreign enemies to defy. He was the first political leader of the American people to identify the national principle with an ideal of reform. He was the first to realize that an American statesman could no longer really represent the national interest without becoming a reformer. Mr. Grover Cleveland showed a glimmering of the necessity of this affiliation; but he could not carry it far, because, as a sincere traditional Democrat, he could not reach a clear understanding of the meaning either of reform or of nationality. Mr. Roosevelt, however, divined that an American statesman who eschewed or evaded the work of reform came inevitably to represent either special and local interests or else a merely Bourbon political tradition, and in this way was disqualified for genuinely national service. He divined that the national principle involved a continual process of internal reformation; and that the reforming idea implied the necessity of more efficient national organization. Consequently, when he became President of the United States and the official representative of the national interest of the country, he attained finally his proper sphere of action. He immediately began the salutary and indispensable work of nationalizing the reform movement.

The nationalization of reform endowed the movement with new vitality and meaning. What Mr. Roosevelt really did was to revive the Hamiltonian ideal of constructive national legislation. During the whole of the nineteenth century that ideal, while by no means dead, was disabled by associations and conditions from active and efficient service. Not until the end of the Spanish War was a condition of public feeling created, which made it possible to revive Hamiltonianism. That war and its resulting policy of extra-territorial expansion, so far from hindering the process of domestic amelioration, availed, from the sheer force of the national aspirations it aroused, to give a tremendous impulse to the work of national reform. It made Americans more sensitive to a national idea and more conscious of their national responsibilities, and it indirectly helped to place in the Presidential chair the man who, as I have said, represented both the national idea and the spirit of reform. The sincere and intelligent combination of those two ideas is bound to issue in the Hamiltonian practice of constructive national legislation.

Of course Theodore Roosevelt is Hamiltonian with a difference. Hamilton's fatal error consisted in his attempt to make the Federal organization not merely the effective engine of the national interest, but also a bulwark against the rising tide of democracy. The new Federalism or rather new Nationalism is not in any way inimical to democracy. On the contrary, not only does Mr. Roosevelt believe himself to be an unimpeachable democrat in theory, but he has given his fellow-countrymen a useful example of the way in which a college-bred and a well-to-do man can become by somewhat forcible means a good practical democrat. The whole tendency of his programme is to give a democratic meaning and purpose to the Hamiltonian tradition and method. He proposes to use the power and the resources of the Federal government for the purpose of making his countrymen a more complete democracy in organization and practice; but he does not make these proposals, as Mr. Bryan does, gingerly and with a bad conscience. He makes them with a frank and full confidence in an efficient national organization as the necessary agent of the national interest and purpose. He has completely abandoned that part of the traditional democratic creed which tends to regard the assumption by the government of responsibility, and its endowment with power adequate to the responsibility as inherently dangerous and undemocratic. He realizes that any efficiency of organization and delegation of power which is necessary to the promotion of the American national interest must be helpful to democracy. More than any other American political leader, except Lincoln, his devotion both to the national and to the democratic ideas is thorough-going and absolute.

As the founder of a new national democracy, then, his influence and his work have tended to emancipate American democracy from its Jeffersonian bondage. They have tended to give a new meaning to popular government by endowing it with larger powers, more positive responsibilities, and a better faith in human excellence. Jefferson believed theoretically in human goodness, but in actual practice his faith in human nature was exceedingly restricted. Just as the older aristocratic theory had been to justify hereditary political leadership by considering the ordinary man as necessarily irresponsible and incapable, so the early French democrats, and Jefferson after them, made faith in the people equivalent to a profound suspicion of responsible official leadership. Exceptional power merely offered exceptional opportunities for abuse. He refused, as far as he could, to endow special men, even when chosen by the people, with any opportunity to promote the public welfare proportionate to their abilities. So far as his influence has prevailed the government of the country was organized on the basis of a cordial distrust of the man of exceptional competence, training, or independence as a public official. To the present day this distrust remains the sign by which the demoralizing influence of the Jeffersonian democratic creed is most plainly to be traced. So far as it continues to be influential it destroys one necessary condition of responsible and efficient government, and it is bound to paralyze any attempt to make the national organization adequate to the promotion of the national interest. Mr. Roosevelt has exhibited his genuinely national spirit in nothing so clearly as in his endeavor to give to men of special ability, training, and eminence a better opportunity to serve the public. He has not only appointed such men to office, but he has tried to supply them with an administrative machinery which would enable them to use their abilities to the best public advantage; and he has thereby shown a faith in human nature far more edifying and far more genuinely democratic than that of Jefferson or Jackson.

Mr. Roosevelt, however, has still another title to distinction among the brethren of reform. He has not only nationalized the movement, and pointed it in the direction of a better conception of democracy, but he has rallied to its hammer the ostensible, if not the very enthusiastic, support of the Republican party. He has restored that party to some sense of its historic position and purpose. As the party which before the War had insisted on making the nation answerable for the solution of the slavery problem, it has inherited the tradition of national responsibility for the national good; but it was rapidly losing all sense of its historic mission, and, like the Whigs, was constantly using its principle and its prestige as a cloak for the aggrandizement of special interests. At its worst it had, indeed, earned some claim on the allegiance of patriotic Americans by its defense of the fiscal system of the country against Mr. Bryan's well-meant but dangerous attack, and by its acceptance after the Spanish War of the responsibilities of extra-territorial expansion; but there was grave danger that its alliance with the "vested" interests would make it unfaithful to its past as the party of responsible national action. It escaped such a fate only by an extremely narrow margin; and the fact that it did escape is due chiefly to the personal influence of Theodore Roosevelt. The Republican party is still very far from being a wholly sincere agent of the national reform interest. Its official leadership is opposed to reform; and it cannot be made to take a single step in advance except under compulsion. But Mr. Roosevelt probably prevented it from drifting into the position of an anti-reform party—which if it had happened would have meant its ruin, and would have damaged the cause of national reform. A Republican party which was untrue to the principle of national responsibility would have no reason for existence; and the Democratic party, as we have seen, cannot become the party of national responsibility without being faithless to its own creed.

VII

THE REFORMATION OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Before finishing this account of Mr. Roosevelt's services as a reformer, and his place in the reforming movement, a serious objection on the score of consistency must be fairly faced. Even admitting that Mr. Roosevelt has dignified reform by identifying it with a programme of constructive national legislation, does the fundamental purpose of his reforming legislation differ essentially from that of Mr. Bryan or Mr. Hearst? How can he be called the founder of a new national democracy when the purpose of democracy from his point of view remains substantially the Jeffersonian ideal of equal rights for all and special privileges for none? If, in one respect, he has been emancipating American democracy from the Jeffersonian bondage, he has in another respect been tightening the bonds, because he has continued to identify democracy with the legal constitution of a system of insurgent, ambiguous, and indiscriminate individual rights.

The validity of such a criticism from the point of view of this book cannot be disputed. The figure of the "Square Deal," which Mr. Roosevelt has flourished so vigorously in public addresses, is a translation into the American vernacular of the Jeffersonian principle of equal rights; and in Mr. Roosevelt's dissertations upon the American ideal he has expressly disclaimed the notion of any more positive definition of the purpose of American democracy. Moreover, his favorite figure gives a sinister application to his assertions that the principle of equal rights is being violated. If the American people are not getting a "Square Deal," it must mean that they are having the cards stacked against them; and in that case the questions of paramount importance are: Who are stacking the cards? And how can they be punished? These are precisely the questions which Hearst is always asking and Hearstism is seeking to answer. Neither has Mr. Roosevelt himself entirely escaped the misleading effects of his own figure. He has too frequently talked as if his opponents deserved to be treated as dishonest sharpers; and he has sometimes behaved as if his suspicions of unfair play on their part were injuring the coolness of his judgment. But at bottom and in the long run Mr. Roosevelt is too fair-minded a man and too patriotic a citizen to become much the victim of his dangerous figure of the "Square Deal." He inculcates for the most part in his political sermons a spirit, not of suspicion and hatred, but of mutual forbearance and confidence; and his programme of reform attaches more importance to a revision of the rules of the game than to the treatment of the winners under the old rules as one would treat a dishonest gambler.

In truth, Mr. Roosevelt has been building either better than he knows or better than he cares to admit. The real meaning of his programme is more novel and more radical than he himself has publicly proclaimed. It implies a conception of democracy and its purpose very different from the Jeffersonian doctrine of equal rights. Evidences of deep antagonism can be discerned between the Hamiltonian method and spirit, represented by Mr. Roosevelt, and a conception of democracy which makes it consist fundamentally in the practical realization of any system of equal rights. The distrust with which thorough-going Jeffersonians regard Mr. Roosevelt's nationalizing programme is a justifiable distrust, because efficient and responsible national organization would be dangerous either to or in the sort of democracy which the doctrine of equal rights encourages—a democracy of suspicious discontent, of selfish claims, of factious agitation, and of individual and class aggression. A thoroughly responsible and efficient national organization would be dangerous in such a democracy, because it might well be captured by some combination of local individual or class interests; and the only effective way to guard against such a danger is to substitute for the Jeffersonian democracy of individual rights a democracy of individual and social improvement. A democracy of individual rights, that is, must either suffer reconstruction by the logic of a process of efficient national organization, or else it may pervert that organization to the service of its own ambiguous, contradictory, and in the end subversive political purposes. A better justification for these statements must be reserved for the succeeding chapter; but in the meantime I will take the risk asserting that Mr. Roosevelt's nationalism really implies a democracy of individual and social improvement. His nationalizing programme has in effect questioned the value of certain fundamental American ideas, and if Mr. Roosevelt has not himself outgrown these ideas, his misreading of his own work need not be a matter of surprise. It is what one would expect from the prophet of the Strenuous Life.

Mr. Roosevelt has done little to encourage candid and consistent thinking. He has preached the doctrine that the paramount and almost the exclusive duty of the American citizen consists in being a sixty-horse-power moral motor-car. In his own career his intelligence has been the handmaid of his will; and the balance between those faculties, so finely exemplified in Abraham Lincoln, has been destroyed by sheer exuberance of moral energy. But although his intelligence is merely the servant of his will, it is at least the willing and competent servant of a single-minded master. If it has not been leavened by the rigorous routine of its work, neither has it been cheapened; and the service has constantly been growing better worth while. During the course of his public career, his original integrity of character has been intensified by the stress of his labors, his achievements, his experiences, and his exhortations. An individuality such as his—wrought with so much consistent purpose out of much variety of experience—brings with it an intellectual economy of its own and a sincere and useful sort of intellectual enlightenment. He may be figured as a Thor wielding with power and effect a sledge-hammer in the cause of national righteousness; and the sympathetic observer, who is not stunned by the noise of the hammer, may occasionally be rewarded by the sight of something more illuminating than a piece of rebellious metal beaten into shape. He may be rewarded by certain unexpected gleams of insight, as if the face of the sledge-hammer were worn bright by hard service and flashed in the sunlight. Mr. Roosevelt sees as far ahead and as much as he needs to see. He has an almost infallible sense of where to strike the next important blow, and even during the ponderous labors of the day he prudently and confidently lays out the task of to-morrow. Thus while he has contributed to the liberation of American intelligence chiefly in the sense that he has given his fellow-countrymen something to think about, he is very far from being a blind, narrow, or unenlightened leader.

Doubtless the only practical road of advance at present is laborious, slow, and not too enlightened. For the time being the hammer is a mightier weapon than the sword or the pen. Americans have the habit of action rather than of thought. Like their forbears in England, they begin to do things, because their common sense tells them that such things have to be done, and then at a later date think over the accomplished fact. A man in public life who told them that their "noble national theory" was ambiguous and distracting, and that many of their popular catchwords were false and exercised a mischievous influence on public affairs, would do so at his own personal risk and cost. The task of plain speaking must be suggested and justified by the achievement of a considerable body of national reconstructive legislation, and must even then devolve largely upon men who have from the political point of view little to gain or to lose by their apparent heresies. The fact, however, that a responsible politician like Mr. Roosevelt must be an example more of moral than of intellectual independence, increases rather than diminishes the eventual importance of consistent thinking and plain speaking as essential parts of the work of political reform. A reforming movement, whose supporters never understand its own proper meaning and purpose, is sure in the end to go astray. It is all very well for Englishmen to do their thinking after the event, because tradition lies at the basis of their national life. But Americans, as a nation, are consecrated to the realization of a group of ideas; and ideas to be fruitful must square both with the facts to which they are applied and with one another. Mr. Roosevelt and his hammer must be accepted gratefully, as the best available type of national reformer; but the day may and should come when a national reformer will appear who can be figured more in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight.


CHAPTER VII

I

RECONSTRUCTION; ITS CONDITIONS AND PURPOSES

The best method of approaching a critical reconstruction of American political ideas will be by means of an analysis of the meaning of democracy. A clear popular understanding of the contents of the democratic principle is obviously of the utmost practical political importance to the American people. Their loyalty to the idea of democracy, as they understand it, cannot be questioned. Nothing of any considerable political importance is done or left undone in the United States, unless such action or inaction can be plausibly defended on democratic grounds; and the only way to secure for the American people the benefit of a comprehensive and consistent political policy will be to derive it from a comprehensive and consistent conception of democracy.

Democracy as most frequently understood is essentially and exhaustively defined as a matter of popular government; and such a definition raises at once a multitude of time-honored, but by no means superannuated, controversies. The constitutional liberals in England, in France, and in this country have always objected to democracy as so understood, because of the possible sanction it affords for the substitution of a popular despotism in the place of the former royal or oligarchic despotisms. From their point of view individual liberty is the greatest blessing which can be secured to a people by a government; and individual liberty can be permanently guaranteed only in case political liberties are in theory and practice subordinated to civil liberties. Popular political institutions constitute a good servant, but a bad master. When introduced in moderation they keep the government of a country in close relation with well-informed public opinion, which is a necessary condition of political sanitation; but if carried too far, such institutions compromise the security of the individual and the integrity of the state. They erect a power in the state, which in theory is unlimited and which constantly tends in practice to dispense with restrictions. A power which is theoretically absolute is under no obligation to respect the rights either of individuals or minorities; and sooner or later such power will be used for the purpose of opposing the individual. The only way to secure individual liberty is, consequently, to organize a state in which the Sovereign power is deprived of any national excuse or legal opportunity of violating certain essential individual rights.

The foregoing criticism of democracy, defined as popular government, may have much practical importance; but there are objections to it on the score of logic. It is not a criticism of a certain conception of democracy, so much as of democracy itself. Ultimate responsibility for the government of a community must reside somewhere. If the single monarch is practically dethroned, as he is by these liberal critics of democracy, some Sovereign power must be provided to take his place. In England Parliament, by means of a steady encroachment on the royal prerogatives, has gradually become Sovereign; but other countries, such as France and the United States, which have wholly dispensed with royalty, cannot, even if they would, make a legislative body Sovereign by the simple process of allowing it to usurp power once enjoyed by the Crown. France did, indeed, after it had finally dispensed with Legitimacy, make two attempts to found governments in which the theory of popular Sovereignty was evaded. The Orleans monarchy, for instance, through the mouths of its friends, denied Sovereignty to the people, without being able to claim it for the King; and this insecurity of its legal framework was an indirect cause of a violent explosion of effective popular Sovereignty in 1848. The apologists for the Second Empire admitted the theory of a Sovereign people, but claimed that the Sovereign power could be safely and efficiently used only in case it were delegated to one Napoleon III—a view the correctness of which the results of the Imperial policy eventually tended to damage. There is in point of fact no logical escape from a theory of popular Sovereignty—once the theory of divinely appointed royal Sovereignty is rejected. An escape can be made, of course, as in England, by means of a compromise and a legal fiction; and such an escape can be fully justified from the English national point of view; but countries which have rejected the royal and aristocratic tradition are forbidden this means of escape—if escape it is. They are obliged to admit the doctrine of popular Sovereignty. They are obliged to proclaim a theory of unlimited popular powers.

To be sure, a democracy may impose rules of action upon itself—as the American democracy did in accepting the Federal Constitution. But in adopting the Federal Constitution the American people did not abandon either its responsibilities or rights as Sovereign. Difficult as it may be to escape from the legal framework defined in the Constitution, that body of law in theory remains merely an instrument which was made for the people and which if necessary can and will be modified. A people, to whom was denied the ultimate responsibility for its welfare, would not have obtained the prime condition of genuine liberty. Individual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny; and I do not see how the existence of such an ultimate popular political freedom and responsibility can be denied by any one who has rejected the theory of a divinely appointed political order. The fallibility of human nature being what it is, the practical application of this theory will have its grave dangers; but these dangers are only evaded and postponed by a failure to place ultimate political responsibility where it belongs. While a country in the position of Germany or Great Britain may be fully justified from the point of view of its national tradition, in merely compromising with democracy, other countries, such as the United States and France, which have earned the right to dispense with these compromises, are at least building their political structure on the real and righteous source of political authority. Democracy may mean something more than a theoretically absolute popular government, but it assuredly cannot mean anything less.

If, however, democracy does not mean anything less than popular Sovereignty, it assuredly does mean something more. It must at least mean an expression of the Sovereign will, which will not contradict and destroy the continuous existence of its own Sovereign power. Several times during the political history of France in the nineteenth century, the popular will has expressed itself in a manner adverse to popular political institutions. Assemblies have been elected by universal suffrage, whose tendencies have been reactionary and undemocratic, and who have been supported in this reactionary policy by an effective public opinion. Or the French people have by means of a plebiscite delegated their Sovereign power to an Imperial dictator, whose whole political system was based on a deep suspicion of the source of his own authority. A particular group of political institutions or course of political action may, then, be representative of the popular will, and yet may be undemocratic. Popular Sovereignty is self-contradictory, unless it is expressed in a manner favorable to its own perpetuity and integrity.

The assertion of the doctrine of popular Sovereignty is, consequently, rather the beginning than the end of democracy. There can be no democracy where the people do not rule; but government by the people is not necessarily democratic. The popular will must in a democratic state be expressed somehow in the interest of democracy itself; and we have not traveled very far towards a satisfactory conception of democracy until this democratic purpose has received some definition. In what way must a democratic state behave in order to contribute to its own integrity?

The ordinary American answer to this question is contained in the assertion of Lincoln, that our government is "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln's phrasing of the principle was due to the fact that the obnoxious and undemocratic system of negro slavery was uppermost in his mind when he made his Gettysburg address; but he meant by his assertion of the principle of equality substantially what is meant to-day by the principle of "equal rights for all and special privileges for none." Government by the people has its natural and logical complement in government for the people. Every state with a legal framework must grant certain rights to individuals; and every state, in so far as it is efficient, must guarantee to the individual that his rights, as legally defined, are secure. But an essentially democratic state consists in the circumstance that all citizens enjoy these rights equally. If any citizen or any group of citizens enjoys by virtue of the law any advantage over their fellow-citizens, then the most sacred principle of democracy is violated. On the other hand, a community in which no man or no group of men are granted by law any advantage over their fellow-citizens is the type of the perfect and fruitful democratic state. Society is organized politically for the benefit of all the people. Such an organization may permit radical differences among individuals in the opportunities and possessions they actually enjoy; but no man would be able to impute his own success or failure to the legal framework of society. Every citizen would be getting a "Square Deal."

Such is the idea of the democratic state, which the majority of good Americans believe to be entirely satisfactory. It should endure indefinitely, because it seeks to satisfy every interest essential to associated life. The interest of the individual is protected, because of the liberties he securely enjoys. The general social interest is equally well protected, because the liberties enjoyed by one or by a few are enjoyed by all. Thus the individual and the social interests are automatically harmonized. The virile democrat in pursuing his own interest "under the law" is contributing effectively to the interest of society, while the social interest consists precisely in the promotion of these individual interests, in so far as they can be equally exercised. The divergent demands of the individual and the social interest can be reconciled by grafting the principle of equality on the thrifty tree of individual rights, and the ripe fruit thereof can be gathered merely by shaking the tree.

It must be immediately admitted, also, that the principle of equal rights, like the principle of ultimate popular political responsibility is the expression of an essential aspect of democracy. There is no room for permanent legal privileges in a democratic state. Such privileges may be and frequently are defended on many excellent grounds. They may unquestionably contribute for a time to social and economic efficiency and to individual independence. But whatever advantage may be derived from such permanent discriminations must be abandoned by a democracy. It cannot afford to give any one class of its citizens a permanent advantage or to others a permanent grievance. It ceases to be a democracy, just as soon as any permanent privileges are conferred by its institutions or its laws; and this equality of right and absence of permanent privilege is the expression of a fundamental social interest.

But the principle of equal rights, like the principle of ultimate popular political responsibility, is not sufficient; and because of its insufficiency results in certain dangerous ambiguities and self-contradictions. American political thinkers have always repudiated the idea that by equality of rights they meant anything like equality of performance or power. The utmost varieties of individual power and ability are bound to exist and are bound to bring about many different levels of individual achievement. Democracy both recognizes the right of the individual to use his powers to the utmost, and encourages him to do so by offering a fair field and, in cases of success, an abundant reward. The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race, while expecting at the same time an unequal finish. But Americans who talk in this way seem wholly blind to the fact that under a legal system which holds private property sacred there may be equal rights, but there cannot possibly be any equal opportunities for exercising such rights. The chance which the individual has to compete with his fellows and take a prize in the race is vitally affected by material conditions over which he has no control. It is as if the competitor in a Marathon cross country run were denied proper nourishment or proper training, and was obliged to toe the mark against rivals who had every benefit of food and discipline. Under such conditions he is not as badly off as if he were entirely excluded from the race. With the aid of exceptional strength and intelligence he may overcome the odds against him and win out. But it would be absurd to claim, because all the rivals toed the same mark, that a man's victory or defeat depended exclusively on his own efforts. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of wealth and thorough education start with an advantage which can be overcome only in very exceptional men,—men so exceptional, in fact, that the average competitor without such benefits feels himself disqualified for the contest.

Because of the ambiguity indicated above, different people with different interests, all of them good patriotic Americans, draw very different inferences from the doctrine of equal rights. The man of conservative ideas and interests means by the rights, which are to be equally exercised, only those rights which are defined and protected by the law—the more fundamental of which are the rights to personal freedom and to private property. The man of radical ideas, on the other hand, observing, as he may very clearly, that these equal rights cannot possibly be made really equivalent to equal opportunities, bases upon the same doctrine a more or less drastic criticism of the existing economic and social order and sometimes of the motives of its beneficiaries and conservators. The same principle, differently interpreted, is the foundation of American political orthodoxy and American political heterodoxy. The same measure of reforming legislation, such as the new Inter-state Commerce Law, seems to one party a wholly inadequate attempt to make the exercise of individual rights a little more equal, while it seems to others an egregious violation of the principle itself. What with reforming legislation on the one hand and the lack of it on the other, the once sweet air of the American political mansion is soured by complaints. Privileges and discriminations seem to lurk in every political and economic corner. The "people" are appealing to the state to protect them against the usurpations of the corporations and the Bosses. The government is appealing to the courts to protect the shippers against the railroads. The corporations are appealing to the Federal courts to protect them from the unfair treatment of state legislatures. Employers are fighting trades-unionism, because it denies equal rights to their employers. The unionists are entreating public opinion to protect them against the unfairness of "government by injunction." To the free trader the whole protectionist system seems a flagrant discrimination on behalf of a certain portion of the community. Everybody seems to be clamoring for a "Square Deal" but nobody seems to be getting it.

The ambiguity of the principle of equal rights and the resulting confusion of counsel are so obvious that there must be some good reason for their apparently unsuspected existence. The truth is that Americans have not readjusted their political ideas to the teaching of their political and economic experience. For a couple of generations after Jefferson had established the doctrine of equal rights as the fundamental principle of the American democracy, the ambiguity resident in the application of the doctrine was concealed. The Jacksonian Democrats, for instance, who were constantly nosing the ground for a scent of unfair treatment, could discover no example of political privileges, except the continued retention of their offices by experienced public servants; and the only case of economic privilege of which they were certain was that of the National Bank. The fact is, of course, that the great majority of Americans were getting a "Square Deal" as long as the economic opportunities of a new country had not been developed and appropriated. Individual and social interest did substantially coincide as long as so many opportunities were open to the poor and untrained man, and as long as the public interest demanded first of all the utmost celerity of economic development. But, as we have seen in a preceding chapter, the economic development of the country resulted inevitably in a condition which demanded on the part of the successful competitor either increasing capital, improved training, or a larger amount of ability and energy. With the advent of comparative economic and social maturity, the exercise of certain legal rights became substantially equivalent to the exercise of a privilege; and if equality of opportunity was to be maintained, it could not be done by virtue of non-interference. The demands of the "Higher Law" began to diverge from the results of the actual legal system.

Public opinion is, of course, extremely loth to admit that there exists any such divergence of individual and social interest, or any such contradiction in the fundamental American principle. Reformers no less than conservatives have been doggedly determined to place some other interpretation upon the generally recognized abuses; and the interpretation on which they have fastened is that some of the victors have captured too many prizes, because they did not play fair. There is just enough truth in this interpretation to make it plausible, although, as we have seen, the most flagrant examples of apparent cheating were due as much to equivocal rules as to any fraudulent intention. But orthodox public opinion is obliged by the necessities of its own situation to exaggerate the truth of its favorite interpretation; and any such exaggeration is attended with grave dangers, precisely because the ambiguous nature of the principle itself gives a similar ambiguity to its violations. The cheating is understood as disobedience to the actual law, or as violation of a Higher Law, according to the interests and preconceptions of the different reformers; but however it is understood, they believe themselves to be upholding some kind of a Law, and hence endowed with some kind of a sacred mission.

Thus the want of integrity in what is supposed to be the formative principle of democracy results, as it did before the Civil War, in a division of the actual substance of the nation. Men naturally disposed to be indignant at people with whom they disagree come to believe that their indignation is comparable to that of the Lord. Men naturally disposed to be envious and suspicious of others more fortunate than themselves come to confuse their suspicions with a duty to the society. Demagogues can appeal to the passions aroused by this prevailing sense of unfair play for the purpose of getting themselves elected to office or for the purpose of passing blundering measures of repression. The type of admirable and popular democrat ceases to be a statesman, attempting to bestow unity and health on the body politic by prescribing more wholesome habits of living. He becomes instead a sublimated District Attorney, whose duty it is to punish violations both of the actual and the "Higher Law." Thus he is figured as a kind of an avenging angel; but (as it happens) he is an avenging angel who can find little to avenge and who has no power of flight. There is an enormous discrepancy between the promises of these gentlemen and their performances, no matter whether they occupy an executive office, the editorial chairs of yellow journals, or merely the place of public prosecutor; and it sometimes happens that public prosecutors who have played the part of avenging angels before election, are, as Mr. William Travers Jerome knows, themselves prosecuted after a few years of office by their aggrieved constituents. The truth is that these gentlemen are confronted by a task which is in a large measure impossible, and which, so far as possible, would be either disappointing or dangerous in its results.

Hence it is that continued loyalty to a contradictory principle is destructive of a wholesome public sentiment and opinion. A wholesome public opinion in a democracy is one which keeps a democracy sound and whole; and it cannot prevail unless the individuals composing it recognize mutual ties and responsibilities which lie deeper than any differences of interest and idea. No formula whose effect on public opinion is not binding and healing and unifying has any substantial claim to consideration as the essential and formative democratic idea. Belief in the principle of equal rights does not bind, heal, and unify public opinion. Its effect rather is confusing, distracting, and at worst, disintegrating. A democratic political organization has no immunity from grievances. They are a necessary result of a complicated and changing industrial and social organism. What is good for one generation will often be followed by consequences that spell deprivation for the next. What is good for one man or one class of men will bring ills to other men or classes of men. What is good for the community as a whole may mean temporary loss and a sense of injustice to a minority. All grievances from any cause should receive full expression in a democracy, but, inasmuch as the righteously discontented must be always with us, the fundamental democratic principle should, above all, counsel mutual forbearance and loyalty. The principle of equal rights encourages mutual suspicion and disloyalty. It tends to attribute individual and social ills, for which general moral, economic, and social causes are usually in large measure responsible, to individual wrong-doing; and in this way it arouses and intensifies that personal and class hatred, which never in any society lies far below the surface. Men who have grievances are inflamed into anger and resentment. In claiming what they believe to be their rights, they are in their own opinion acting on behalf not merely of their interests, but of an absolute democratic principle. Their angry resentment becomes transformed in their own minds into righteous indignation; and there may be turned loose upon the community a horde of self-seeking fanatics—like unto those soldiers in the religious wars who robbed and slaughtered their opponents in the service of God.

II

DEMOCRACY AND DISCRIMINATION

The principle of equal rights has always appealed to its more patriotic and sensible adherents as essentially an impartial rule of political action—one that held a perfectly fair balance between the individual and society, and between different and hostile individual and class interests. But as a fundamental principle of democratic policy it is as ambiguous in this respect as it is in other respects. In its traditional form and expression it has concealed an extremely partial interest under a formal proclamation of impartiality. The political thinker who popularized it in this country was not concerned fundamentally with harmonizing the essential interest of the individual with the essential popular or social interest. Jefferson's political system was intended for the benefit only of a special class of individuals, viz., those average people who would not be helped by any really formative rule or method of discrimination. In practice it has proved to be inimical to individual liberty, efficiency, and distinction. An insistent demand for equality, even in the form of a demand for equal rights, inevitably has a negative and limiting effect upon the free and able exercise of individual opportunities. From the Jeffersonian point of view democracy would incur a graver danger from a violation of equality than it would profit from a triumphant assertion of individual liberty. Every opportunity for the edifying exercise of power, on the part either of an individual, a group of individuals, or the state is by its very nature also an opportunity for its evil exercise. The political leader whose official power depends upon popular confidence may betray the trust. The corporation employing thousands of men and supplying millions of people with some necessary service or commodity may reduce the cost of production only for its own profit. The state may use its great authority chiefly for the benefit of special interests. The advocate of equal rights is preoccupied by these opportunities for the abusive exercise of power, because from his point of view rights exercised in the interest of inequality have ceased to be righteous. He distrusts those forms of individual and associated activity which give any individual or association substantial advantages over their associates. He becomes suspicious of any kind of individual and social distinction with the nature and effects of which he is not completely familiar.

A democracy of equal rights may tend to encourage certain expressions of individual liberty; but they are few in number and limited in scope. It rejoices in the freedom of its citizens, provided this freedom receives certain ordinary expressions. It will follow a political leader, like Jefferson or Jackson, with a blind confidence of which a really free democracy would not be capable, because such leaders are, or claim to be in every respect, except their prominence, one of the "people." Distinction of this kind does not separate a leader from the majority. It only ties them together more firmly. It is an acceptable assertion of individual liberty, because it is liberty converted by its exercise into a kind of equality. In the same way the American democracy most cordially admired for a long time men, who pursued more energetically and successfully than their fellows, ordinary business occupations, because they believed that such familiar expressions of individual liberty really tended towards social and industrial homogeneity. Herein they were mistaken; but the supposition was made in good faith, and it constitutes the basis of the Jeffersonian Democrat's illusion in reference to his own interest in liberty. He dislikes or ignores liberty, only when it looks in the direction of moral and intellectual emancipation. In so far as his influence has prevailed, Americans have been encouraged to think those thoughts and to perform those acts which everybody else is thinking and performing.

The effect of a belief in the principle of "equal rights" on freedom is, however, most clearly shown by its attitude toward Democratic political organization and policy. A people jealous of their rights are not sufficiently afraid of special individual efficiency and distinction to take very many precautions against it. They greet it oftener with neglect than with positive coercion. Jeffersonian Democracy is, however, very much afraid of any examples of associated efficiency. Equality of rights is most in clanger of being violated when the exercise of rights is associated with power, and any unusual amount of power is usually derived from the association of a number of individuals for a common purpose. The most dangerous example of such association is not, however, a huge corporation or a labor union; it is the state. The state cannot be bound hand and foot by the law, as can a corporation, because it necessarily possesses some powers of legislation; and the power to legislate inevitably escapes the limitation of the principle of equal rights. The power to legislate implies the power to discriminate; and the best way consequently for a good democracy of equal rights to avoid the danger of discrimination will be to organize the state so that its power for ill will be rigidly restricted. The possible preferential interference on the part of a strong and efficient government must be checked by making the government feeble and devoid of independence. The less independent and efficient the several departments of the government are permitted to become, the less likely that the government as a whole will use its power for anything but a really popular purpose.

In the foregoing type of political organization, which has been very much favored by the American democracy, the freedom of the official political leader is sacrificed for the benefit of the supposed freedom of that class of equalized individuals known as the "people," but by the "people" Jefferson and his followers have never meant all the people or the people as a whole. They have meant a sort of apotheosized majority—the people in so far as they could be generalized and reduced to an average. The interests of this class were conceived as inimical to any discrimination which tended to select peculiarly efficient individuals or those who were peculiarly capable of social service. The system of equal rights, particularly in its economic and political application has worked for the benefit of such a class, but rather in its effect upon American intelligence and morals, than in its effect upon American political and economic development. The system, that is, has only partly served the purpose of its founder and his followers, and it has failed because it did not bring with it any machinery adequate even to its own insipid and barren purposes. Even the meager social interest which Jefferson concealed under cover of his demand for equal rights could not be promoted without some effective organ of social responsibility; and the Democrats of to-day are obliged, as we have seen, to invoke the action of the central government to destroy those economic discriminations which its former inaction had encouraged. But even so the traditional democracy still retains its dislike of centralized and socialized responsibility. It consents to use the machinery of the government only for a negative or destructive object. Such must always be the case as long as it remains true to its fundamental principle. That principle defines the social interest merely in the terms of an indiscriminate individualism—which is the one kind of individualism murderous to both the essential individual and the essential social interest.

The net result has been that wherever the attempt to discriminate in favor of the average or indiscriminate individual has succeeded, it has succeeded at the expense of individual liberty, efficiency, and distinction; but it has more often failed than succeeded. Whenever the exceptional individual has been given any genuine liberty, he has inevitably conquered. That is the whole meaning of the process of economic and social development traced in certain preceding chapters. The strong and capable men not only conquer, but they seek to perpetuate their conquests by occupying all the strategic points in the economic and political battle-field—whereby they obtain certain more or less permanent advantages over their fellow-democrats. Thus in so far as the equal rights are freely exercised, they are bound to result in inequalities; and these inequalities are bound to make for their own perpetuation, and so to provoke still further discrimination. Wherever the principle has been allowed to mean what it seems to mean, it has determined and encouraged its own violation. The marriage which it is supposed to consecrate between liberty and equality gives birth to unnatural children, whose nature it is to devour one or the other of their parents.

The only way in which the thorough-going adherent of the principle of equal rights can treat these tendencies to discrimination, when they develop, is rigidly to repress them; and this tendency to repression is now beginning to take possession of those Americans who represent the pure Democratic tradition. They propose to crush out the chief examples of effective individual and associated action, which their system of democracy has encouraged to develop. They propose frankly to destroy, so far as possible, the economic organization which has been built up under stress of competitive conditions; and by assuming such an attitude they have fallen away even from the pretense of impartiality, and have come out as frankly representative of a class interest. But even to assert this class interest efficiently they have been obliged to abandon, in fact if not in word, their correlative principle of national irresponsibility. Whatever the national interest may be, it is not to be asserted by the political practice of non-interference. The hope of automatic democratic fulfillment must be abandoned. The national government must stop in and discriminate; but it must discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of equality and the average man.

Thus the Jeffersonian principle of national irresponsibility can no longer be maintained by those Democrats who sincerely believe that the inequalities of power generated in the American economic and political system are dangerous to the integrity of the democratic state. To this extent really sincere followers of Jefferson are obliged to admit the superior political wisdom of Hamilton's principle of national responsibility, and once they have made this admission, they have implicitly abandoned their contention that the doctrine of equal rights is a sufficient principle of democratic political action. They have implicitly accepted the idea that the public interest is to be asserted, not merely by equalizing individual rights, but by controlling individuals in the exercise of those rights. The national public interest has to be affirmed by positive and aggressive fiction. The nation has to have a will and a policy as well as the individual; and this policy can no longer be confined to the merely negative task of keeping individual rights from becoming in any way privileged.

The arduous and responsible political task which a nation in its collective capacity must seek to perform is that of selecting among the various prevailing ways of exercising individual rights those which contribute to national perpetuity and integrity. Such selection implies some interference with the natural course of popular notion; and that interference is always costly and may be harmful either to the individual or the social interest must be frankly admitted. He would be a foolish Hamiltonian who would claim that a state, no matter how efficiently organized and ably managed, will not make serious and perhaps enduring mistakes; but he can answer that inaction and irresponsibility are more costly and dangerous than intelligent and responsible interference. The practice of non-interference is just as selective in its effects as the practice of state interference. It means merely that the nation is willing to accept the results of natural selection instead of preferring to substitute the results of artificial selection. In one way or another a nation is bound to recognize the results of selection. The Hamiltonian principle of national responsibility recognizes the inevitability of selection; and since it is inevitable, is not afraid to interfere on behalf of the selection of the really fittest. If a selective policy is pursued in good faith and with sufficient intelligence, the nation will at least be learning from its mistakes. It should find out gradually the kind and method of selection, which is most desirable, and how far selection by non-interference is to be preferred to active selection.

As a matter of fact the American democracy both in its central and in its local governments has always practiced both methods of selection. The state governments have sedulously indulged in a kind of interference conspicuous both for its activity and its inefficiency. The Federal government, on the other hand, has been permitted to interfere very much less; but even during the palmiest days of national irresponsibility it did not altogether escape active intervention. A protective tariff is, of course, a plain case of preferential class legislation, and so was the original Inter-state Commerce Act. They were designed to substitute artificial preferences for those effected by unregulated individual action, on the ground that the proposed modification of the natural course of trade would contribute to the general economic prosperity. No less preferential in purpose are the measures of reform recently enacted by the central government. The amended Inter-state Commerce Law largely increases the power of possible discrimination possessed by the Federal Commission. The Pure Food Bill forbids many practices, which have arisen in connection with the manufacture of food products, and discriminates against the perpetrators of such practices. Factory legislation or laws regulating the hours of labor have a similar meaning and justification. It is not too much to say that substantially all the industrial legislation, demanded by the "people" both here and abroad and passed in the popular interest, has been based essentially on class discrimination.

The situation which these laws are supposed to meet is always the same. A certain number of individuals enjoy, in the beginning, equal opportunities to perform certain acts; and in the competition resulting there from some of these individuals or associations obtain advantages over their competitors, or over their fellow-citizens whom they employ or serve. Sometimes these advantages and the practices whereby they are obtained are profitable to a larger number of people than they injure. Sometimes the reverse is true. In either event the state is usually asked to interfere by the class whose economic position has been compromised. It by no means follows that the state should acquiesce in this demand. In many cases interference may be more costly than beneficial. Each case must be considered on its merits. But whether in any particular case the state takes sides or remains impartial, it most assuredly has a positive function to perform on the promises. If it remains impartial, it simply agrees to abide by the results of natural selection. If it interferes, it seeks to replace natural with artificial discrimination. In both cases it authorizes discriminations which in their effect violate the doctrine of "equal rights." Of course, a reformer can always claim that any particular measure of reform proposes merely to restore to the people a "Square Deal"; but that is simply an easy and thoughtless way of concealing novel purposes under familiar formulas. Any genuine measure of economic or political reform will, of course, give certain individuals better opportunities than those they have been recently enjoying, but it will reach this result only by depriving other individuals of advantages which they have earned.

Impartiality is the duty of the judge rather than the statesman, of the courts rather than the government. The state which proposes to draw a ring around the conflicting interests of its citizens and interfere only on behalf of a fair fight will be obliged to interfere constantly and will never accomplish its purpose. In economic warfare, the fighting can never be fair for long, and it is the business of the state to see that its own friends are victorious. It holds, if you please, itself a hand in the game. The several players are playing, not merely with one another, but with the political and social bank. The security and perpetuity of the state and of the individual in so far an he is a social animal, depend upon the victory of the national interest—as represented both in the assurance of the national profit and in the domination of the nation's friends. It is in the position of the bank at Monte Carlo, which does not pretend to play fair, but which frankly promulgates rules advantageous to itself. Considering the percentage in its favor and the length of its purse, it cannot possibly lose. It is not really gambling; and it does not propose to take any unnecessary risks. Neither can a state, democratic or otherwise, which believes in its own purpose. While preserving at times an appearance of impartiality so that its citizens may enjoy for a while a sense of the reality of their private game, it must on the whole make the rules in its own interest. It must help those men to win who are most capable of using their winnings for the benefit of society.

III

CONSTRUCTIVE DISCRIMINATION

Assuming, then, that a democracy cannot avoid the constant assertion of national responsibility for the national welfare, an all-important question remains as to the way in which and the purpose for which this interference should be exercised. Should it be exercised on behalf of individual liberty? Should it be exercised on behalf of social equality? Is there any way in which it can be exercised on behalf both of liberty and equality?

Hamilton and the constitutional liberals asserted that the state should interfere exclusively on behalf of individual liberty; but Hamilton was no democrat and was not outlining the policy of a democratic state. In point of fact democracies have never been satisfied with a definition of democratic policy in terms of liberty. Not only have the particular friends of liberty usually been hostile to democracy, but democracies both in idea and behavior have frequently been hostile to liberty; and they have been justified in distrusting a political régime organized wholly or even chiefly for its benefit. "La Liberté," says Mr. Emile Faguet, in the preface to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvième Siècle"—"La Liberté s'oppose à l'Égalité, car La Liberté est aristocratique par essence. La Liberté ne se donne jamais, ne s'octroie jamais; elle se conquiert. Or ne peuvent la conquérir que des groupes sociaux qui out su se donne la cohérence, l'organisation et la discipline et qui par conséquent, sont des groupes aristocratiques." The fact that states organized exclusively or largely for the benefit of liberty are essentially aristocratic explains the hostile and suspicious attitude of democracies towards such a principle of political action.

Only a comparatively small minority are capable at any one time of exercising political, economic, and civil liberties in an able, efficient, or thoroughly worthy manner; and a régime wrought for the benefit of such a minority would become at best a state, in which economic, political, and social power would be very unevenly distributed—a state like the Orleans Monarchy in France of the "Bourgeoisie" and the "Intellectuals." Such a state might well give its citizens fairly good government, as did the Orleans Monarchy; but just in so far as the mass of the people had any will of its own, it could not arouse vital popular interest and support; and it could not contribute, except negatively, to the fund of popular good sense and experience. The lack of such popular support caused the death of the French liberal monarchy; and no such régime can endure, save, as in England, by virtue of a somewhat abject popular acquiescence. As long as it does endure, moreover, it tends to undermine the virtue of its own beneficiaries. The favored minority, feeling as they do tolerably sure of their position, can scarcely avoid a habit of making it somewhat too easy for one another. The political, economic, and intellectual leaders begin to be selected without any sufficient test of their efficiency. Some sort of a test continues to be required; but the standards which determine it drift into a condition of being narrow, artificial, and lax. Political, intellectual, and social leadership, in order to preserve its vitality needs a feeling of effective responsibility to a body of public opinion as wide, as varied, and as exacting as that of the whole community.

The desirable democratic object, implied in the traditional democratic demand for equality, consists precisely in that of bestowing a share of the responsibility and the benefits, derived from political and economic association, upon the whole community. Democracies have assumed and have been right in assuming that a proper diffusion of effective responsibility and substantial benefits is the one means whereby a community can be supplied with an ultimate and sufficient bond of union. The American democracy has attempted to manufacture a sufficient bond out of the equalization of rights: but such a bond is, as we have seen, either a rope of sand or a link of chains. A similar object must be achieved in some other way; and the ultimate success of democracy depends upon its achievement.

The fundamental political and social problem of a democracy may be summarized in the following terms. A democracy, like every political and social group, is composed of individuals, and must be organized for the benefit of its constituent members. But the individual has no chance of effective personal power except by means of the secure exercise of certain personal rights. Such rights, then, must be secured and exercised; yet when they are exercised, their tendency is to divide the community into divergent classes. Even if enjoyed with some equality in the beginning, they do not continue to be equally enjoyed, but make towards discriminations advantageous to a minority. The state, as representing the common interest, is obliged to admit the inevitability of such classifications and divisions, and has itself no alternative but to exercise a decisive preference on behalf of one side or the other. A well-governed state will use its power to promote edifying and desirable discriminations. But if discriminations tend to divide the community, and the state itself cannot do more than select among the various possible cases of discrimination those which it has some reason to prefer, how is the solidarity of the community to be preserved? And above all, how is a democratic community, which necessarily includes everybody in its benefits and responsibilities, to be kept well united? Such a community must retain an ultimate bond of union which counteracts the divergent effect of the discriminations, yet which at the same time is not fundamentally hostile to individual liberties.

The clew to the best available solution of the problem is supplied by a consideration of the precise manner, in which the advantages derived from the efficient exercise of liberties become inimical to a wholesome social condition. The hostility depends, not upon the existence of such advantageous discriminations for a time, but upon their persistence for too long a time. When, either from natural or artificial causes, they are properly selected, they contribute at the time of their selection both to individual and to social efficiency. They have been earned, and it is both just and edifying that, in so far as they have been earned, they should be freely enjoyed. On the other hand, they should not, so far as possible, be allowed to outlast their own utility. They must continue to be earned. It is power and opportunity enjoyed without being earned which help to damage the individual—both the individuals who benefit and the individuals who consent—and which tend to loosen the ultimate social bond. A democracy, no less than a monarchy or an aristocracy, must recognize political, economic, and social discriminations, but it must also manage to withdraw its consent whenever these discriminations show any tendency to excessive endurance. The essential wholeness of the community depends absolutely on the ceaseless creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy and their equally incessant replacement.

Both in its organization and in its policy a democratic state has consequently to seek two different but supplementary objects. It is the function of such a state to represent the whole community; and the whole community includes the individual as well as the mass, the many as well as the few. The individual is merged in the mass, unless he is enabled to exercise efficiently and independently his own private and special purposes. He must not only be permitted, he must be encouraged to earn distinction; and the best way in which he can be encouraged to earn distinction is to reward distinction both by abundant opportunity and cordial appreciation. Individual distinction, resulting from the efficient performance of special work, is not only the foundation of all genuine individuality, but is usually of the utmost social value. In so far as it is efficient, it has a tendency to be constructive. It both inserts some member into the social edifice which forms for the time being a desirable part of the whole structure, but it tends to establish a standard of achievement which may well form a permanent contribution to social amelioration. It is useful to the whole community, not because it is derived from popular sources or conforms to popular standards, but because it is formative and so helps to convert the community into a well-formed whole.

Distinction, however, even when it is earned, always has a tendency to remain satisfied with its achievements, and to seek indefinitely its own perpetuation. When such a course is pursued by an efficient and distinguished individual, he is, of course, faithless to the meaning and the source of his own individual power. In abandoning and replacing him a democracy is not recreant to the principle of individual liberty. It is merely subjecting individual liberty to conditions which promote and determine its continued efficiency. Such conditions never have been and never will be imposed for long by individuals or classes of individuals upon themselves. They must be imposed by the community, and nothing less than the whole community. The efficient exercise of individual power is necessary to form a community and make it whole, but the duty of keeping it whole rests with the community itself. It must consciously and resolutely preserve the social benefit, derived from the achievements of its favorite sons; and the most effective means thereto is that of denying to favoritism of all kinds the opportunity of becoming a mere habit.

The specific means whereby this necessary and formative favoritism can be prevented from becoming a mere habit vary radically among the different fields of personal activity. In the field of intellectual work the conditions imposed upon the individual must for the most part be the creation of public opinion; and in its proper place this aspect of the relation between individuality and democracy will receive special consideration. In the present connection, however, the relation of individual liberty to democratic organization and policy can be illustrated and explained most helpfully by a consideration of the binding and formative conditions of political and economic liberty. Democracies have always been chiefly preoccupied with the problems raised by the exercise of political and economic opportunities, because success in politics and business implies the control of a great deal of physical power and the consequent possession by the victors in a peculiar degree of both the motive and the means to perpetuate their victory.

The particular friends of freedom, such as Hamilton and the French "doctrinaires," have always believed that both civil and political liberty depended on the denial of popular Sovereignty and the rigid limitation of the suffrage. Of course, a democrat cannot accept such a conclusion. He should doubtless admit that the possession of absolute Sovereign power is always liable to abuse; and if he is candid, he can hardly fail to add that democratic favoritism is subject to the same weakness as aristocratic or royal favoritism. It tends, that is, to make individuals seek distinction not by high individual efficiency, but by compromises in the interest of useful popularity. It would be vain to deny the gravity of this danger or the extent to which, in the best of democracies, the seekers after all kinds of distinction have been hypnotized by an express desire for popularity. But American statesmen have not always been obliged to choose between Hamilton's unpopular integrity and Henry Clay's unprincipled bidding for popular favor. The greatest American political leaders have been popular without any personal capitulation; and their success is indicative of what is theoretically the most wholesome relation between individual political liberty and a democratic distribution of effective political power. The highest and most profitable individual political distinction is that which is won from a large field and from a whole people. Political, even more than other kinds of distinction, should not be the fruit of a limited area of selection. It must be open to everybody, and it must be acceptable to the community as a whole. In fact, the concession of substantially equal political rights is an absolute condition of any fundamental political bond. Grave as are the dangers which a democratic political system incurs, still graver ones are incurred by a rigidly limited electoral organization. A community, so organized, betrays a fundamental lack of confidence in the mutual loyalty and good faith of its members, and such a community can remain well united only at the cost of a mixture of patronage and servility.

The limitation of the suffrage to those who are individually capable of making the best use of it has the appearance of being reasonable; and it has made a strong appeal to those statesmen and thinkers who believed in the political leadership of intelligent and educated men. Neither can it be denied that a rigidly restricted suffrage might well make in the beginning for administrative efficiency and good government. But it must never be forgotten that a limited suffrage confines ultimate political responsibility, not only to a number of peculiarly competent individuals, but to a larger or smaller class; and in the long run a class is never to be trusted to govern in the interest of the whole community. A democracy should encourage the political leadership of experienced, educated, and well-trained men, but only on the express condition that their power is delegated and is to be used, under severe penalties, for the benefit of the people as a whole. A limited suffrage secures governmental efficiency, if at all, at the expense of the political education and training of the disfranchised class, and at the expense, also, of a permanent and radical popular political grievance. A substantially universal suffrage merely places the ultimate political responsibility in the hands of those for whose benefit governments are created; and its denial can be justified only on the ground that the whole community is incapable of exercising the responsibility. Such cases unquestionably exist. They exist wherever the individuals constituting a community, as at present in the South, are more divided by social or class ambitions and prejudices than they are united by a tradition of common action and mutual loyalty. But wherever the whole people are capable of thinking, feeling, and acting as if they constituted a whole, universal suffrage, even if it costs something in temporary efficiency, has a tendency to be more salutary and more formative than a restricted suffrage.

The substantially equal political rights enjoyed by the American people for so many generations have not proved dangerous to the civil liberties of the individual and, except to a limited extent, not to his political liberty. Of course, the American democracy has been absolutely opposed to the delegation to individuals of official political power, except under rigid conditions both as to scope and duration; and the particular friends of liberty have always claimed that such rigid conditions destroyed individual political independence and freedom. Hamilton, for instance, was insistent upon the necessity of an upper house consisting of life-members who would not be dependent on popular favor for their retention of office. But such proposals have no chance of prevailing in a sensible democracy. A democracy is justified in refusing to bestow permanent political power upon individuals, because such permanent tenure of office relaxes oftener than it stimulates the efficiency of the favored individual, and makes him attach excessive importance to mere independence. The official leaders of a democracy should, indeed, hold their offices under conditions which will enable them to act and think independently; but independence is really valuable only when the officeholder has won it from his own followers. Under any other conditions it is not only peculiarly liable to abuse, but it deprives the whole people of that ultimate responsibility for their own welfare, without which democracy is meaningless. A democracy is or should be constantly delegating an effective share in this responsibility to its official leaders, but only on condition that the power and responsibility delegated is partial and is periodically resumed.

The only Americans who hold important official positions for life are the judges of the Federal courts. Radical democrats have always protested against this exception, which, nevertheless, can be permitted without any infringement of democratic principles. The peculiar position of the Federal judge is symptomatic of the peculiar importance in the American system of the Federal Constitution. A senator would be less likely to be an efficient and public-spirited legislator, in case he were not obliged at regular intervals to prove title to his distinction. A justice of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, can the better perform his special task, provided he has a firm and permanent hold upon his office. He cannot, to be sure, entirely escape responsibility to public opinion, but his primary duty is to expound the Constitution as he understands it; and it is a duty which demands the utmost personal independence. The fault with the American system in this respect consists not in the independence of the Federal judiciary, but in the practical immutability of the Constitution. If the instrument which the Supreme Court expounds could be altered whenever a sufficiently large body of public opinion has demanded a change for a sufficiently long time, the American democracy would have much more to gain than to fear from the independence of the Federal judiciary.