minority domination and the new system of majority rule. And yet
scarcely ever do our text-books or magazine articles dealing with
present political evils even so much as allude to this most important
fact--the one, indeed, on which hinges our whole system of business
fraud and political corruption. We often hear the opinion expressed by
people of more than ordinary intelligence that the public immorality so
much in evidence in this country is the natural and inevitable result of
popular government. This view is industriously encouraged by the
conservative and even accepted by not a few of those whose sympathies
are with democracy. Yet no conclusion could be more erroneous. It would
be just as logical to attribute the religious persecutions of the Middle
Ages to the growth of religious dissent. If there had been no
dissenters, there would have been no persecution; neither would there
have been any reformation or any progress toward a system of religious
liberty. Persecution was the means employed to repress dissent and
defeat the end which the dissenters had in view. Corruption sustains
exactly the same relation to the democratic movement of modern times. It
has been employed, not to promote, but to defeat the ends of popular
government. No intelligent person should any longer be in doubt as to
the real source of corruption. It is to be eradicated, not by placing
additional restrictions on the power of the people, but by removing
those political restraints upon the majority which now preclude any
effective popular control of public officials. We forget that when our
government was established the principle of majority rule was nowhere
recognized--that until well along into the nineteenth century the
majority of our forefathers did not even have the right to vote. The
minority governed under the sanction of the Constitution and the law of
the land. Then a great popular movement swept over the country, and in
the political upheaval which followed, the masses secured the right of
suffrage. But universal suffrage, though essential to, does not ensure
popular government. The right to vote for some, or even all, public
officials, does not necessarily involve any effective control over such
officials by, or any real responsibility to, the majority of the voters.
Nor is any constitutional system set up to achieve the purpose of
minority rule likely to contain those provisions which are necessary for
the enforcement of public op