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 hi