y possible dangers. Popular liberty must be
protected against possible administrative or executive tyranny by free
representative institutions. Individual liberty must be protected
against the action of an unjust majority by the strongest possible legal
guarantees. And above all the general liberties of the community must
not be endangered by any inefficiency of the government as a whole. The
only method whereby these complicated and, in a measure, conflicting
ends could be attained was by a system of checks and balances, which
would make the executive, legislative, and judicial departments of the
government independent of one another, while at the same time endowing
each department with all the essentials of efficient action within its
own sphere. But such a method of political organization was calculated
to thwart the popular will, just in so far as that will did not conform
to what the Federalists believed to be the essentials of a stable
political and social order. It was antagonistic to democracy as that
word was then, and is still to a large extent, understood.

The extent of this antagonism to democracy, if not in intention at least
in effect, is frequently over-rated. The antagonism depends upon the
identification of democracy with a political organization for expressing
immediately and completely the will of the majority--whatever that will
may be; and such a conception of democracy contains only part of the
truth. Nevertheless the founders of the Constitution did succeed in
giving some effect to their distrust of the democratic principle, no
matter how conservatively defined; and this was at once a grave error on
their part and a grave misfortune for the American state. Founded as the
national government is, partly on a distrust of the American democracy,
it has always tended to make the democracy somewhat suspicious of the
national government. This mutual suspicion, while it has been limited in
scope and diminished by the action of time, constitutes a manifest
impediment to the efficient action of the American political system. The
great lesson of American political experience, as we shall see, is
rather that of interdependence than of incompatibility between an
efficient national organization and a group of radical democratic
institutions and ideals; and the meaning of this lesson has been
obscured, because the Federal organization has not been constituted in a
sufficiently democratic spirit, and because, con