l: the same pyramiding of influence,
the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not
necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human
organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the
life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation supports this, the
real power was held not by the president, not by the voters or
policy-holders, but by men who were not even directors. After a while we
took it as a matter of course that the head of a company was an
administrative dummy, with a dependence on unofficial power similar to
that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That seems to be typical of the
whole economic life of this country. It is controlled by groups of men
whose influence extends like a web to smaller, tributary groups, cutting
across all official boundaries and designations, making short work of all
legal formulae, and exercising sovereignty regardless of the little fences
we erect to keep it in bounds.

A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition. The
boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there
exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and
elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded
as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the
ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it
squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use
human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it, then
we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes of
mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts.

The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the
fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and
are compelled to submit to it. The nature of political power we shall not
change. If that is the way human societies organize sovereignty, the
sooner we face that fact the better. For the object of democracy is not
to imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness political power to the
nation's need. If corporations and governments have indeed gone on a joy
ride the business of reform is not to set up fences, Sherman Acts and
injunctions into which they can bump, but to take the wheel and to steer.

The corruption of which we hear so much is certainly not ac