cy sound and
whole; and it cannot prevail unless the individuals composing it
recognize mutual ties and responsibilities which lie deeper than any
differences of interest and idea. No formula whose effect on public
opinion is not binding and healing and unifying has any substantial
claim to consideration as the essential and formative democratic idea.
Belief in the principle of equal rights does not bind, heal, and unify
public opinion. Its effect rather is confusing, distracting, and at
worst, disintegrating. A democratic political organization has no
immunity from grievances. They are a necessary result of a complicated
and changing industrial and social organism. What is good for one
generation will often be followed by consequences that spell deprivation
for the next. What is good for one man or one class of men will bring
ills to other men or classes of men. What is good for the community as a
whole may mean temporary loss and a sense of injustice to a minority.
All grievances from any cause should receive full expression in a
democracy, but, inasmuch as the righteously discontented must be always
with us, the fundamental democratic principle should, above all, counsel
mutual forbearance and loyalty. The principle of equal rights encourages
mutual suspicion and disloyalty. It tends to attribute individual and
social ills, for which general moral, economic, and social causes are
usually in large measure responsible, to individual wrong-doing; and in
this way it arouses and intensifies that personal and class hatred,
which never in any society lies far below the surface. Men who have
grievances are inflamed into anger and resentment. In claiming what they
believe to be their rights, they are in their own opinion acting on
behalf not merely of their interests, but of an absolute democratic
principle. Their angry resentment becomes transformed in their own minds
into righteous indignation; and there may be turned loose upon the
community a horde of self-seeking fanatics--like unto those soldiers in
the religious wars who robbed and slaughtered their opponents in the
service of God.

II

DEMOCRACY AND DISCRIMINATION

The principle of equal rights has always appealed to its more patriotic
and sensible adherents as essentially an impartial rule of political
action--one that held a perfectly fair balance between the individual
and society, and between different and hostile individual and class
interests. But as a fun