the cynicism of
the professional politician and the low average of character,
intelligence and manners of the strata of society that increasingly are
usurping all power, work towards producing that general contempt and
aversion that have become so evident of late and that are a menace to
society no less than that of the decaying institution itself.

Confronted by a situation such as this, the natural tendency of those
who suffer under it, either in their material interests or their ideals,
is to condemn the mechanism, perhaps even the very principles for the
operation of which the various machines were devised. Some reject the
whole scheme of representative, parliamentary government, and, failing
any plausible substitute, are driven back on some form of the soviet, or
even government by industrial groups. Those that go to the limit and
reject the whole scheme of democracy are in still worse plight for they
have no alternative to offer except a restored monarchy, and this, the
_terminus ad quem_ of their logic, their courage will not permit them to
avow.

It is a dilemma, but forced, I believe, by the fatal passion of the man
of modernism for the machine, the mechanical device, the material
equivalent for a thing that has no equivalent, and that is the personal
character of the constituents of society and the working factors in a
political organism. There was never a more foolish saying than that
which is so frequently and so boastfully used: "a government of laws and
not of men." This is the exact reversal of what should be recognized as
a self-evident truth, viz, that the quality of the men, not the nature
of the laws or of the administrative machine, is the determining factor
in government. You may take any form of government ever devised by man,
monarchy, aristocracy, republic, democracy, yes, or soviet, and if the
community in which this government operates has a working majority of
men of character, intelligence and spiritual energy, it will be a good
government, whereas if the working majority is deficient in these
characteristics, or if it makes itself negligible by abstention from
public affairs it will be a bad government. There is no one political
system which is right while all others are wrong. The monarchy of St.
Louis was better than the Third Republic, as this is better than was the
monarchy of Louis XV. The aristocracy of Washington was better than the
democracy of this year of grace, as this in itself