that the immigrants of that race, although low in
physique, poverty, and standards of living, are fairly well screened of
actual paupers.

CHAPTER VIII

POLITICS

American democracy was ushered in on a theory of equality. And no word
has been more strangely used and abused. There is the monarchical idea
of equality, and Mr. Mallock begs the question when he gives the title
"Aristocracy and Evolution" to a book on the necessary part played by
great men. Doubtless, in Greek, aristocracy means "government by the
best," but in history it means government by the privilege of birth and
landed property. Democracy may be in philology "government by the mob,"
but in politics and industry it has been opportunity for great men
without blood or property. Mr. Muensterberg, too, sees the breakdown of
American democracy and the reaction towards aristocracy in the
prominence of civil-service reform, the preeminence conceded to business
ability, the deference to wealth, and the conquest of the
Philippines.[103] But civil-service reform is only a device for opening
the door to merit that has been shut by privilege. In England it was the
means by which the mercantile classes broke into the offices preempted
by the younger sons of aristocracy.[104] In America it is an awkward
means of admitting ability wherever found to positions seized upon by
political usurpers. It appealed to the American democracy only when its
advocates learned to call it, not "civil-service reform," but "the merit
system." As for the astonishing power of mere wealth in American affairs
the testimony of another English observer is based on wider observation
when he says, "Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared with the
tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and
(it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while
the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence."[105]

A feeling of disappointment holds true of the conquest and treatment of
the Philippines. That a war waged out of sympathy for an oppressed
island nearby should have shaken down an unnoticed archipelago across
the ocean was taken in childlike glee as the unexpected reward of
virtue. But serious thinking has followed on seeing that these islands
have added another race problem to the many that have thwarted
democracy. Only a plutocracy sprung from race divisions at home could
profit by race-subjection abroad, and the onl