will be rigidly restricted. The possible preferential
interference on the part of a strong and efficient government must be
checked by making the government feeble and devoid of independence. The
less independent and efficient the several departments of the government
are permitted to become, the less likely that the government as a whole
will use its power for anything but a really popular purpose.

In the foregoing type of political organization, which has been very
much favored by the American democracy, the freedom of the official
political leader is sacrificed for the benefit of the supposed freedom
of that class of equalized individuals known as the "people," but by the
"people" Jefferson and his followers have never meant all the people or
the people as a whole. They have meant a sort of apotheosized
majority--the people in so far as they could be generalized and reduced
to an average. The interests of this class were conceived as inimical to
any discrimination which tended to select peculiarly efficient
individuals or those who were peculiarly capable of social service. The
system of equal rights, particularly in its economic and political
application _has_ worked for the benefit of such a class, but rather in
its effect upon American intelligence and morals, than in its effect
upon American political and economic development. The system, that is,
has only partly served the purpose of its founder and his followers, and
it has failed because it did not bring with it any machinery adequate
even to its own insipid and barren purposes. Even the meager social
interest which Jefferson concealed under cover of his demand for equal
rights could not be promoted without some effective organ of social
responsibility; and the Democrats of to-day are obliged, as we have
seen, to invoke the action of the central government to destroy those
economic discriminations which its former inaction had encouraged. But
even so the traditional democracy still retains its dislike of
centralized and socialized responsibility. It consents to use the
machinery of the government only for a negative or destructive object.
Such must always be the case as long as it remains true to its
fundamental principle. That principle defines the social interest merely
in the terms of an indiscriminate individualism--which is the one kind
of individualism murderous to both the essential individual and the
essential social interest.

The net result has be