The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the democratic ideal. For a long time, too—until he had come to know more of the actual business of democracy—he had never questioned democratic practice. He was young and innocent.

But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him—or his hopeful heart had not let him understand—that men had to struggle against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.

His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in democracy—quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never imagined. Surely, the love of money was the root of all evil—or of nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement and potentiality—yes, and whose freedom—he and his schoolfellows had written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought. War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.

And all this took place under a democracy—a government which he had been taught was the most equitable on earth, the refuge of the poor and the oppressed, who sailed into the haven where Liberty was Enlightening the World to enter the Land of Promise where all their tears should be wiped away! And the worst of it was, that those who talked most loudly of the democratic ideal were those most eager to profit at its expense. If he could have laid it all to the rich or the aristocratic, it would not have been so bad; but he couldn't. The poor were by nature as greedy and unjust as the rich, and showed themselves as bad in practice when they had the chance, and the democrat turned tyrant as soon as it suited his purse or ambition. It was dismaying. The contrast between the actual workings of democracy and the ideal his innocence had worshipped was so enormous that he sometimes doubted whether they had anything at all in common.

But in time dismay, and even surprise, had worn away, and he recovered equanimity. He was disillusioned, but still a democrat. At the same time he learned of the weakness of his idol, he learned of the weakness of human nature. He knew that the evils he lamented were due much more to human weakness than to the form of government under which the evils occurred. With a philosopher of his own land, he agreed that no form of government was so good as not to work ill in the hands of the bad, and none so bad as not to work well in the hands of the good. Henceforth, if he must worry, let it be about men.

Thus it was that the Democrat, from being a partisan, became a Spectator. Democracy—or what was called that—was amusing: it was so human—so human in its faults, so human in its self-deception. He was moved to smiles at the spectacle of a nation of individuals all wisely thinking themselves intelligent voters, patriots, and capable managers of their country's affairs.

Was it, after all, a democracy? The Democrat possessed the none too common art of looking behind mere words, and contemplating Things as They Are. He was reading his magazine one evening—it contained one of those comforting political science essays, entitled "Whither Are We Drifting?"—when the notion seized on him to find some better name for the government under which he lived. So he laid aside the essay, and let his thoughts run.

Elimination seemed to appeal as a method. He made a whimsical beginning: it wasn't a timocracy; however much the love of honor flourished, it seemed agreed that it was not that which ruled the nation. That the government wasn't an ochlocracy he also felt sure; for, in spite of the rule of mobs, in labor troubles, lynchings, institutions of learning, and weddings in high life, he well knew that the real authority of the land lay in fewer hands.

Was it, then, an aristocracy? That could not be, for no one was better than anyone else. In matters of personal worth there was no superlative; there was not even a comparative. At least, there was no surer path to defeat at the polls than for a candidate to be called "better," to say nothing of "best."

Whether it was a theocracy hardly needed consideration. True, the coin of the realm recorded the nation's Trust in God, and God was frequently quoted as being heartily in favor of a variety of political projects; but on the whole the Democrat was convinced that the function of the inscription was decorative, and felt that any proposal to entrust God alone with the affairs of the nation would create a mighty upheaval in politics and commerce, and be followed by a period of depression. He couldn't really see that God had much part in the actual government, though he would not go so far as Epicurus, and say that He cared nothing about what men were doing. He felt more like agreeing with the Hebrew who conceived God as laughing men to derision. And besides, to say that the government was at present a theocracy would place the Democrat in the position of an adverse critic of the Almighty, which was as much as to say that he himself was better than the Almighty; and that would be undemocratic.

On the whole, those who called the government an oligarchy seemed to be getting more near to reality; for at certain crises it became quite clear that a few men determined the measures of government. And yet, the individuals of the group were not always the same, but varied according to the interests involved; and they were not an openly constituted and declared body, elected by the people. To be sure, they operated through legislators, but they themselves were more often than not far removed from open political life. To call the real government a plutocracy, its governing agents plutocrats, and their instruments the legislators, seemed reasonable enough. It was humiliating, it seemed the fact that the great democracy was ruled, not by itself, but by a Thing.

However, the rule of money, that is, financial self-interest, was not really a form of government; it was only an influence, and one that might work good as well as ill. It underlay, more or less, all governments, not only modern, but ancient as well, and had to, in the nature of things, so long as property existed and prosperity meant increase. What else did the phenomenon of economic history-writing signify but the appreciation of this fact?

The Democrat concluded to let the government under which he lived stand as a democracy. The term might not be absolutely sufficient, but it covered the case as well as any. At any rate, whatever the reality, the government was cast in the democratic mold: every man had a vote, and was sovereign over it, and could sell it, or throw it away, or even make use of it, as he chose; and he was represented, or at least thought he was, by someone whom he elected, or thought he elected; and was heeded when he clamored his desires or his indignation, provided it didn't interfere too much with what his representative was induced to conceive to be the interests of "the people."

And there were also other manifestations of the democratic ideal which really distinguished the government under which he lived from that of many other nations. There was democracy in education. The public set out to educate all its sons and daughters, from kindergarten to college Commencement. The day was past when education was only for gentlemen's sons; the children of the people, rich and poor, blue-blooded and flat-footed, male and female, brainy and brainless, came to college, and within its walls there was no connection, it was said, between honors and money or place. Students dressed from the same clothes-shop, yelled the same college yell, bought their apparatus at a co-operative store, ate at the same boarding-house, took the same examinations, often subserving the cause of democracy by evading aristocratic tyranny in the person of the faculty and making democratic use of their neighbors' learning, and asked no questions about each other's finances or forbears—except, of course, the fraternity and sorority students, who had tria nomina and were the exceptions to prove the rule.

And not only were the college rolls and records indicative of democracy, but there was a democracy of subjects to study. You had free election: one subject was as good as another, one course as valuable as another. So long as you had the required number of credits, the character of the credits made no difference: an hour contained sixty minutes, and no hour set up to be better than its fellows. A college education was defined as "something of everything for everybody," and the definition was especially applicable to the education of the State Universities, those great examples of learning in action. In them anyone might study anything at any time under any instructor under any conditions and in any place—for you could study in absence, and by correspondence, and hypnotism, and Christian Science. And when you got through, whatever your method or matter or capacity or docility or imbecility, you were labelled A. B., and were as good as any other A. B., and had a fortune assured—until you found out that the great democratic world thought A. B. no better than D. F., or any other combination of letters, or no letters at all.

Yes, and there was democracy of religion as well as of education. Ministers wore plain clothes, avoided religion in conversation, greeted everyone with the loudness which in some way had become confused with cordiality, romped with children, attended kissing parties, and used slang in sermons. Men believed anything, or nothing; it was a free country, a free age. Any religion, or any interpretation of it, was as good as any other, so long as you really believed it. You could pray kneeling, or standing, or sitting, or walking, or jumping—as you chose. You could interpret your creed literally, or symbolically, or allegorically, or pragmatically. You could devote your church edifice to God, or you could make it a meeting-house for the people, and use it for socials, athletics, kindergarten, lyceum, vaudeville, soup kitchens, rummage sales, teachers' institutes—and when all these religious activities grew too extensive for it, you could sell it to the liveryman or the storage company or the movie-man. What were churches for, if not for the people?

There was democracy in art, too—especially in literature. Poets wrote in what vein and in what meter they chose, at what length, with what attention to rhyme and rhythm, with what preparation or equipment they chose. They bowed before no laws, ancient or modern. If they made use of the great names in poetry, it was to justify their own vagaries. They not only pleaded Tennyson for Tennysonian liberties, but took what additional license they chose on the ground of personal liberty. Didn't Homer nod? Of course; and, taking advantage of the example, they slept the sleep of the unworrying. Poets could write in prose, and prose authors dress their commonplace thoughts in verse. In oratory and the novel, matter was all, form nothing. Men were content if their readers could get their meaning; the compelling power of style and accurate expression were qualities for which they were unwilling to pay the price of long and patient preparation. Olympus, Helicon, and Arcadia had become the paradise of anarchists, to say nothing of democrats. Who cared now when Zeus's ambrosial locks were shaken in wrath, or Apollo slammed his baton down in a rage? Who were they, to set up to be better than others?

And, as for painters and sculptors, and architects and musicians, who should presume to tyrannize over them by requiring standards of style or subject? If an architect chose to construct a High School that looked like a prison or a warehouse, why shouldn't he? After all, what was the High School but the people's college, and what was its purpose if not to fit the sons and daughters of the commonwealth for life, and why should it be built in the Tudor style, or in any other style? What the people needed was usefulness, not style. And if a musician wished to compose an overture imitative of all the noises that accompanied the Retreat from Moscow, including French and Russian profanity, or if a painter preferred to paint a drunken prostitute rather than Diana or a Daughter of the Revolution, why shouldn't he? It was a free country, a democratic age, and it was time art entered into the service of the people.

And there was democracy of manners, too, and of dress. Democracy had grown so used to insisting on clothes not making the man, that distinction in dress had long been a rarity, and men were no longer constrained to live up to the garb they wore. You could wear a white vest without obligation to keep it clean, and you could appear with silk hat and long coat without being suspected of religion or literature. Men made the clothes now: the process was reversed; they made them by the wholesale, every season, and if you weren't satisfied with a good democratic costume—i. e., the one imposed by the despotic democratic fashion of the season—and had your clothing made to adorn, why, you were an aristocrat.

And if clothes didn't oblige, neither did noblesse, that other aristocratic bugbear, oblige. Gentlemen? Family? Why, everyone was a gentleman, from pugilist to preacher. Who said so? Why, who but the gentleman himself? It was a free country, and a man had a right to be a gentleman if he chose, didn't he? Just what a gentleman was, to be sure, no one seemed able to say; but no one failed to lay claim to the title, or to pull off his coat and prove the justice of his claim if you denied it. Surely there was no greater proof of the beneficent power of democracy than that it made all men gentlemen, and all women ladies.

And there was democracy in the home as well. The American husband was so democratic that he bettered the apostolic instruction which told wives to be obedient to their husbands. You might have thought that it read the reverse. And children—the children of democratic America were famous the world over for their unquestioning assumption of knowledge and authority, for their assurance and aggressiveness; for their easy contradiction of their parents, who were intimidated by the pedagogical direction never to let your child fear you. Travellers returned from Europe and reported no Hans and Giovannino who made wide the mouth and thrust out the tongue in the streets of aristocracy. Since the time of the bald-headed prophet and the two and forty she-bears, it had been natural for youth to presume on its superiority, but it was only the spirit of democracy which seemed to encourage the presumption.

But why not? If democracy meant equality, why not be consistent? If all men—black and white, good and bad, rich and poor, wise and foolish—were to be made equal, why not all women with them? Women were surely members of the commonwealth. And why not all children? Hadn't Spencer said so? Children were members of the commonwealth, too. And why not the beasts, wild and tame, who were also part and parcel of the population of the country? Why stop merely with men?

Yes, the Democrat concluded, his country was best described as a democracy, even though the few ruled over the many in matters of substance, and the many ruled over the few in art and manners, and both were tyrants. He remembered Plato's definition—Plato the blasphemer—and it seemed applicable to his own time: "Democracy, a charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike." It was marvellous how men believed in their equality with other men, what self-confidence they possessed, and what assurance came to them from the oft repeated word liberty. "This is a free country, and I'm just as good as you" could be said by anyone, and was said by everyone, and as a result his back was a little stiffer and his head a degree or two more erect. Foreigners learned to say it before they learned to speak the language. The very animals seemed to understand it; it was Plato over again: "And the horses and asses had come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of free men; and they would run at anybody whom they met in the street if he did not get out of their way: and all things were just ready to burst with liberty."

The Democrat, you see, through his habit of looking at Things as They Are, had come to possess a lively sense of the ridiculous side of democracy—its inconsistencies, its unconscious enjoyment of words, its silly self-deception and placid self-satisfaction.

Now that you have seen the workings of his mind, you will easily understand, too, how the expression of his thoughts might provoke those who were always on the lookout for the red rag of aristocracy. And the fact is, that on occasion he did express his thoughts with great frankness and no little vehemence; and, as no one likes to be told his faults by even a friendly critic, he often brought the angry hornets of democracy about his ears.

Yes, and by your smiling you seem to say that he deserved it. And yet I assure you now, as I did in the beginning, that he was really a democrat. You must not mistake realization of the faults of democracy in operation for hostility to democracy itself. He had seen something of life in aristocratic countries, and was thankful above all things that there was something in the atmosphere of his own land which had the effect of making men look up. This virtue alone covered a multitude of the sins of democracy. There was something in his country more than the mere form of democratic society. Whether men got their rights or not, they knew they had rights, and anyone who wanted to make them consent to injustice had at least to take the trouble of giving it the appearance of justice. And not only were they possessed of a lively sense of their own rights, but the air was full of talk about other people's having their rights. Generosity and benevolence were abroad in the land. It was, to be sure, something of the sort of Sidney Smith's benevolence—the feeling which A experienced when he thought B ought to do something to relieve C's necessities; but even that kind was better than none. It was vastly important whether large classes of human beings acquiesced in being regarded as cattle—as they seemed to in the Old World—or not.

But if he had a vivid sense of the desirability of the democratic ideal, he had just as vivid a sense of the dangers of democratic practice. It was not difficult to see that the universal talk about making all men equal, vapid as it might be, was having an effect which could but make the judicious grieve. It was pulling excellence from her lofty seat to set her on a level with mediocrity. Democracy aimed at equality. But equality on a high plane was impossible. Certain men—most men—could not rise to a high plane, or would not. Those therefore who could climb were not to keep on climbing, but to remain at the lower level, or return from the heights, or assist those who were at the lowest of all. Not all could reach the mountain top; therefore let those who were able to make the ascent engage in assisting the great majority to attain the middle space of the incline. Not all could take a college degree; therefore let the college degree be brought within the reach of all. Not all could be gentlemen; therefore reconstruct and democratize the definition of the gentleman. In scholarship, religion, manners, in literature, in all the arts—in everything except the art of making money—democracy seemed in danger of fostering the mediocre, and discouraging the excellent. In its effort for breadth, it was encouraging shallowness. It might be that for the poorest, the meanest, and the stupidest, democracy meant individualism and opportunity; but for the brightest and most ambitious, it seemed to partake of the nature of tyranny. The main idea in Plato's Republic was the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. In the Modern Republic it seemed something like the sacrifice of the best to the good, the leveling down of the highest as well as the raising up of the lowest. Certain kinds of talent and effort were in great danger of neglect—the kind of talent and effort which had made nations live in history. If there was anything in the record of the past, if civilization was not on the wrong track, and if literature and religion and the arts were indeed the supremely worth while, it seemed plain that the encouragement of uniformity beyond limits was a crime against the race. The atoms of Democritus, streaming forever downward in parallel lines, would never have accomplished a world. It needed an Epicurus and a Lucretius to recognize that they must have swerved from their deadly course of uniformity. It took friction and collision to beget a universe. The democratic passion for freedom and equality and uniformity once fully realized, what deadness and monotony! And as for the boasted educating power of responsibility, there was as little chance for it in the frictionless machine of perfect democracy as under despotism itself.

Democracy certainly did savor of the machine; just as the object of machinery was to insure a uniform product without personal handling of each individual piece, so the object of democracy seemed to be in such wise to regulate the affairs of men that justice would be automatic.

The fact was, human laziness occupied great space in the foundations of the democratic spirit. There were other qualities also, of course. There was misapprehension. The democratic poor imagined ideal possession on the part of those more prosperous than themselves, and the democratic rich imagined the extreme of unpossession on the part of those poorer than themselves; and both forgot, or had never discovered, what Horace knew two thousand years ago, that the poor man was seasick in the hired skiff the same as the rich man in his private trireme. And there was the spirit of restlessness—the everlasting desire of the human animal for new things, and his perennial ignorance of the fact that a change of sky did not necessarily mean a change of heart. And of course there was human sympathy, the greatest of them all.

But the place of human laziness was great. Men shrank from responsibility; uniformity and automatic justice appealed to them. Democracy was a labor-saving device. The meting out of justice by and to individuals was difficult, and took time, and, what was worse, thought. It was much easier to legislate a form of equality, and have done with it—to press a button, have a uniform product, and not bother with hand-made goods.

Not that equality and uniformity were undesirable. The trouble with the popular democratic ideal consisted only in its exaggeration. The democracy of the enthusiastic multitude was an extreme. Aristocracy went to the extreme of inequality and diversity, and democracy went to the extreme of equality and uniformity. Both extremes were vicious; for vices are only exaggerated virtues. And vices are easier than virtue, extremes easier than the golden mean. To proceed on the assumption that all men could be treated as free and equal was easier by far than to recognize and study their inequalities and limitations, and to attempt the best for each individual; but the result was only a vicious approximation.

Let democracy recognize that there were two sides to the shield. The Democrat sympathized with the ignorant and needy, and believed that the more fortunate should make cheerful sacrifice to help them rise. As for himself, he would regulate his conduct among men on the basis of worth, not wealth or blood,

and stand ready to obey unselfishly any measure for the common good, however undesirable from his particular point of view. If, however, he demanded sacrifice on the part of the more fortunate in the interest of the masses, he demanded no less the spirit of sacrifice on the part of the masses for the sake of such of their fellows as gave evidence of superior worth. A democracy should be a great family, in which the sons of promise were gladly helped on their way to honor and usefulness, even at the cost of deprivation and suffering on the part of the rest of the household—as in many an actual family which performed such sacrifice, and rejoiced in it—and by the sacrifice added to its own glory and strength. It should give all its sons and daughters the greatest possible opportunity of self-realization, but never fail to recognize that some selves were more worth realization than others. Whatever was levelled, let it not be intellect or character.

After all, government was a means, not an end. The end was character—individual and national. A form of government was good or bad as it succeeded or failed to produce that depth and breadth of individual and collective spirit which marked great eras in history—such a spirit as that which made possible the Parthenon or the North Portal of the Erechtheum; or turned back the Armada; or inspired the Italian Risorgimento; or crystallized into the dramas of Shakespeare or Sophocles; or formed the soul of other periods when men were actuated by passionate desire for the common good and common glory, for time and eternity. The momentary good of the individual—his comfort or enjoyment—was a worthy ideal only in so far as it contributed to character. Without elevation of the ideals of the individual citizen, there could be no great leaders; without great leaders there was no vision, and the people perished.

So it appears that the Democrat's ideal society was somewhere between that of Plato, who thought that, until the union of political power and philosophy in the same person could be effected, there would be no relief, and that in which the Democrat lived, where men were chosen lawmakers and rulers ostensibly because they were good fellows, or at least none of your damned aristocrats.