en that wherever the attempt to discriminate in
favor of the average or indiscriminate individual has succeeded, it has
succeeded at the expense of individual liberty, efficiency, and
distinction; but it has more often failed than succeeded. Whenever the
exceptional individual has been given any genuine liberty, he has
inevitably conquered. That is the whole meaning of the process of
economic and social development traced in certain preceding chapters.
The strong and capable men not only conquer, but they seek to perpetuate
their conquests by occupying all the strategic points in the economic
and political battle-field--whereby they obtain certain more or less
permanent advantages over their fellow-democrats. Thus in so far as the
equal rights are freely exercised, they are bound to result in
inequalities; and these inequalities are bound to make for their own
perpetuation, and so to provoke still further discrimination. Wherever
the principle has been allowed to mean what it seems to mean, it has
determined and encouraged its own violation. The marriage which it is
supposed to consecrate between liberty and equality gives birth to
unnatural children, whose nature it is to devour one or the other of
their parents.

The only way in which the thorough-going adherent of the principle of
equal rights can treat these tendencies to discrimination, when they
develop, is rigidly to repress them; and this tendency to repression is
now beginning to take possession of those Americans who represent the
pure Democratic tradition. They propose to crush out the chief examples
of effective individual and associated action, which their system of
democracy has encouraged to develop. They propose frankly to destroy, so
far as possible, the economic organization which has been built up under
stress of competitive conditions; and by assuming such an attitude they
have fallen away even from the pretense of impartiality, and have come
out as frankly representative of a class interest. But even to assert
this class interest efficiently they have been obliged to abandon, in
fact if not in word, their correlative principle of national
irresponsibility. Whatever the national interest may be, it is not to be
asserted by the political practice of non-interference. The hope of
automatic democratic fulfillment must be abandoned. The national
government must stop in and discriminate; but it must discriminate, not
on behalf of liberty and the special i