and
traditions, and certain laws and limitations of thought upon which the
newspapers work, and which, within the confines of its inherent laws,
they direct. If one dwell chiefly on the possibilities of the former
element, one may conjure up a practical end to democracy in the vision
of a State "run" entirely by a group of highly forcible and intellectual
persons--usually the dream takes the shape of financiers and their
associates, their perfected mechanism of party control working the
elections boldly and capably, and their public policy being directed
towards financial ends. One of the common prophecies of the future of
the United States is such a domination by a group of trust organizers
and political bosses. But a man, or a group of men, so strong and
intelligent as would be needed to hold an entire party machine within
the confines of his--or their collective--mind and will, could, at the
most, be but a very transitory and incidental phenomenon in the history
of the world. Either such an exploitation of the central control will
have to be covert and subtle beyond any precedent in human
disingenuousness, or else its domination will have to be very amply
modified indeed, by the requirements of the second factor, and its
proceedings made very largely the resultant of that second factor's
forces. Moreover, very subtle men do not aim at things of this sort, or
aiming, fail, because subtlety of intelligence involves subtlety of
character, a certain fastidiousness and a certain weakness. Now that the
garrulous period, when a flow of language and a certain effectiveness of
manner was a necessary condition to political pre-eminence, is passing
away, political control falls more and more entirely into the hands of a
barristerish intriguing sort of person with a tough-wearing, leathery,
practical mind. The sort of people who will work the machine are people
with "faith," as the popular preachers say, meaning, in fact, people who
do not analyze, people who will take the machine as it is,
unquestioningly, shape their ambitions to it, and--saving their
vanity--work it as it wants to go. The man who will be boss will be the
man who wants to be boss, who finds, in being boss, a complete and final
satisfaction, and not the man who complicates things by wanting to be
boss in order to be, or do, something else. The machines are governed
to-day, and there is every reason to believe that they will continue to
be governed, by masterful