s guided by an agency behind which leaves him scarcely any choice. "Use
your political power as we tell you, or else throw it away," is the
alternative offered to the citizen. The political machinery as it is now
worked, has little resemblance to that contemplated at the outset of
your political life. Manifestly, those who framed your Constitution
never dreamed that twenty thousand citizens would go to the poll led by
a "boss." America exemplifies at the other end of the social scale, a
change analogous to that which has taken place under sundry despotisms.
You know that in Japan, before the recent Revolution, the divine ruler,
the Mikado, nominally supreme, was practically a puppet in the hands of
his chief minister, the Shogun. Here it seems to me that "the sovereign
people" is fast becoming a puppet which moves and speaks as wire-pullers
determine.

Then you think that Republican institutions are a failure?

By no means: I imply no such conclusion. Thirty years ago, when often
discussing politics with an English friend, and defending Republican
institutions, as I always have done and do still, and when he urged
against me the ill-working of such institutions over here, I habitually
replied that the Americans got their form of government by a happy
accident, not by normal progress, and that they would have to go back
before they could go forward. What has since happened seems to me to
have justified that view; and what I see now, confirms me in it. America
is showing, on a larger scale than ever before, that "paper
Constitutions" will not work as they are intended to work. The truth,
first recognized by Mackintosh, that Constitutions are not made but
grow, which is part of the larger truth that societies, throughout their
whole organizations, are not made but grow, at once, when accepted,
disposes of the notion that you can work as you hope any
artificially-devised system of government. It becomes an inference that
if your political structure has been manufactured and not grown, it
will forthwith begin to grow into something different from that
intended--something in harmony with the natures of the citizens, and the
conditions under which the society exists. And it evidently has been so
with you. Within the forms of your Constitution there has grown up this
organization of professional politicians altogether uncontemplated at
the outset, which has become in large measure the ruling power.

But will not education and