ion is attended with grave dangers, precisely because
the ambiguous nature of the principle itself gives a similar ambiguity
to its violations. The cheating is understood as disobedience to the
actual law, or as violation of a Higher Law, according to the interests
and preconceptions of the different reformers; but however it is
understood, they believe themselves to be upholding some kind of a Law,
and hence endowed with some kind of a sacred mission.

Thus the want of integrity in what is supposed to be the formative
principle of democracy results, as it did before the Civil War, in a
division of the actual substance of the nation. Men naturally disposed
to be indignant at people with whom they disagree come to believe that
their indignation is comparable to that of the Lord. Men naturally
disposed to be envious and suspicious of others more fortunate than
themselves come to confuse their suspicions with a duty to the society.
Demagogues can appeal to the passions aroused by this prevailing sense
of unfair play for the purpose of getting themselves elected to office
or for the purpose of passing blundering measures of repression. The
type of admirable and popular democrat ceases to be a statesman,
attempting to bestow unity and health on the body politic by prescribing
more wholesome habits of living. He becomes instead a sublimated
District Attorney, whose duty it is to punish violations both of the
actual and the "Higher Law." Thus he is figured as a kind of an avenging
angel; but (as it happens) he is an avenging angel who can find little
to avenge and who has no power of flight. There is an enormous
discrepancy between the promises of these gentlemen and their
performances, no matter whether they occupy an executive office, the
editorial chairs of yellow journals, or merely the place of public
prosecutor; and it sometimes happens that public prosecutors who have
played the part of avenging angels before election, are, as Mr. William
Travers Jerome knows, themselves prosecuted after a few years of office
by their aggrieved constituents. The truth is that these gentlemen are
confronted by a task which is in a large measure impossible, and which,
so far as possible, would be either disappointing or dangerous in its
results.

Hence it is that continued loyalty to a contradictory principle is
destructive of a wholesome public sentiment and opinion. A wholesome
public opinion in a democracy is one which keeps a democra