England seems to suffer in the same way. In
May, 1912, the "Daily Mail" published a series of articles by H. G. Wells
on "The Labour Unrest." Is he not describing almost any session of
Congress when he says that "to go into the House of Commons is to go
aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner
where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialized Assembly
which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our
affairs?" Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing actuality of
our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day.... In
Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections.
What really happens at a general election is that the party
organizations--obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious
funds--appoint about 1200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we
so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled
angry way, to strike off the names of about half these selected
gentlemen."

A cynic might say that the people can't go far wrong in politics because
they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is
unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the
money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents
in the interest of a mediocre regularity.

But suppose that politics were made responsive--suppose that the forces
of the community found avenues of expression into public life. Would not
our legislatures be cut up into antagonistic parties, would not the
conflicts of the nation be concentrated into one heated hall? If you
really represented the country in its government, would you not get its
partisanship in a quintessential form? After all group interests in the
nation are diluted by space and time: the mere separation in cities and
country prevents them from falling into the psychology of the crowd. But
let them all be represented in one room by men who are professionally
interested in their constituency's prejudices and what would you
accomplish but a deepening of the cleavages? Would the session not become
an interminable wrangle?

Nobody can answer these questions with any certainty. Most prophecies are
simply the masquerades of prejudice, and the people who love stability
and prefer to let their own well-being alone will see in a sensitive
political system little but an invitation to chaos. They will choose
facts to adorn t