atement was made with reference to
France, but it would apply as well to England, Switzerland, and all
other countries in which the principle of majority rule has received
full recognition.

On the other hand American constitutional and legal literature still
inculcates and keeps alive fear and distrust of majority rule. The
official and ruling class in this country has been profoundly influenced
by political ideas which have long been discarded in the countries which
have made the most rapid strides in the direction of popular government.
The influence which our constitutional and legal literature, based as it
is upon a profound distrust of majority rule, has had upon the lawyers,
politicians, and public men of this country can hardly be overestimated.
It is true that many who have been most influenced by this spirit of
distrust toward popular government would be unwilling to admit that they
are opposed to majority rule--in fact, they may regard themselves as
sincere believers in democracy. This is not to be wondered at when we
consider that throughout our history under the Constitution the old and
the new have been systematically jumbled in our political literature. In
fact, the main effort of our constitutional writers would appear to be
to give to the undemocratic eighteenth-century political ideas a garb
and setting that would in a measure reconcile them with the democratic
point of view. The natural and inevitable result has followed. The
students of American political literature have imbibed the fundamental
idea of the old system--its distrust of majority rule--along with a
certain sentimental attachment to and acceptance of the outward forms of
democracy. This irreconcilable contradiction between the form and the
substance, the body and the spirit of our political institutions is not
generally recognized even by the American students of government.
Constitutional writers have been too much preoccupied with the thought
of defending and glorifying the work of the fathers and not enough
interested in disclosing its true relation to present-day thought and
tendencies. As a consequence of this, the political ideas of our
educated classes represent a curious admixture of democratic beliefs
superimposed upon a hardly conscious substratum of eighteenth-century
doctrines. It is this contradiction in our thinking that has been one of
our chief sources of difficulty in dealing with political problems.
While honestly believ