competent to judge. The opinion of one may be as good as that of another on such general and clearly understood question as woman suffrage or the prohibition of liquor, but why should the uneducated voter be able to form any sound opinion on a complicated legal matter? He would shrink from giving technical advice on the management of a business in which his savings were invested. There is no reason to believe that his advice is any more useful in the management of the business of government. Why, furthermore, should a resident of one part of a State understand the local needs of a distant section? In the Legislature such questions can be fully discussed, and the conflicting arguments weighed by the legislators. Among the electorate at large this is impossible. Yet a decision arrived at by the people's representatives is held in little esteem, whereas a direct decision, even if secured from a minority of the people, is devoutly accepted as the will of God-except by suffragists and prohibitionists when the vote goes against them. It is notable also that this divine fiat is most strenuously asserted when the vote has been particularly close.

The impulse of the uneducated citizen is to vote to curb the activities of the successful man of affairs, of whom he is jealous, and to secure himself from direct taxation. As Professor Barrett Wendell said several years ago in his prophetic book, "The Privileged Classes": in the course of the last century or so one great maxim of the American Revolution seems to have got queerly turned around. Our forefathers protested against taxation without representation; our fellow citizens now demand, as their natural right, something very like representation without taxation." This statement was derided as fantastic exaggeration. To-day it is literally true. One hears nothing of the demand because it is accorded, and as a "natural right." Poll taxes, long the only tax on laboring men, have in many places been abolished, and everywhere they are

evaded, yet these people, who pay no taxes, have representation in the fullest measure. They now demand control, and to grant it is everywhere the tendency. Because they are in the majority they insist that through their representatives, or better by direct legislation, they should have, for example, the spending of money which others have contributed. The natural result is gross extravagance. The spendthrift who comes into a great inheritance is proverbially the prey of his friends, spends his substance recklessly, and so the man of the people, suddenly elevated to office, first rewards his friends by installing them in positions for which they may be quite as little fitted as he is for his, and then together they expend the funds collected in taxes from corporations and the richer citizens. This is not to accuse them of dishonesty. They are sometimes extravagant through ignorance of business methods; sometimes through a quite honest carrying out of their social and political creed that it is the duty of a successful candidate for office to repay his supporters.

A natural result of this is that only men who hold this creed stand a real chance of election. Those who have paid the taxes and who have the greatest interest in the proper spending of public funds, have little influence. Massachusetts, long considered one of the most conservative States of the Union, is now typical of all. Its Lieutenant-Governor went not long ago to Washington to protest against the appointment to Federal offices of “highbrows"-his own contemptuous appellation for all who have inherited social position or independent means. ter an election in a certain State, an unusually intelligent postman was asked for whom he voted for Governor. "For the Democrat," was his immediate response. "I knew he wasn't as good as either of the other candidates, but he has worked up from the bottom and the others have not, so I thought he deserved to be rewarded." Such incidents are unimportant, except that they are symptomatic of the trend of

Af

American politics. Men, not principles, carry elections, and it is rapidly becoming universal to estimate men not for what they are at the moment, not for what their abilities may enable them to accomplish for the State or for the nation, but rather for what their origins have been. Viewed from this angle, the excellent man who has started near the top is not comparable with the mediocre man who has started at the bottom. Even though the latter has not caught up, he has climbed farther. Although he may be less efficient for a particular work, he is more spectacular. Those who are still at the bottom trust him because they recognize in him one of themselves. Many vote for him because he represents their idea of democracy. Many also vote for him because they know that he will reward them by turning over to them a part of the public money of which their support has made him the temporary guardian and disburser. The result is that public offices are filled with men who are technically incompetent.

Men are elected to office, therefore, on a basis which ignores technical fitness and is ultra-democratic. While in office, however, they are given free rein and have distinctly autocratic authority-an authority to initiate legislation and an almost despotic power over the rights of individuals. President Wilson has been called the most despotic of modern rulers, and this is hardly an over-statement, since he has chosen to exert his personal authority as no President has done before. But there is no complaint. He claims no authority by the divine right of inheritance, which claim brought revolution in France, but by a divine right expressed through the suffrage. The people therefore acquiesce. The President is secure because of the origin of his power and because, in his official acts, he is supposed to represent the popular will. Had that will been formulated in clear principles, his hands would be tied, but he was not elected to carry out a definite programme. Party platforms are subordinate to

party leaders. A President is elected because he represents, or is supposed to represent, the restless and perhaps rapidly changing wishes of the people. Just now these popular aspirations are towards a vague radicalism, and this Mr. Wilson was expected to work out in detail as he saw fit. The President thus has more power of personal initiative, a wider scope of action, than is ever the case with a British Prime Minister.

Inactivity is seldom the dominant fault of American officials. They are only too ready to make as many laws as can be crowded into their terms of office. As a result, there is in America the anomaly of what prides itself on being a radical democracy under which people submit quietly to multitudinous and often vexatious rules and regulations. Personal liberty is circumscribed to an often exasperating extent, sometimes merely by the idle. whim of an official, as in the order of the Secretary of the Navy that officers should not drink. The time may come when the country will no longer submit to ill-considered regulations, but there is a present danger of the forcible breaking of the bonds because different men are affected in different ways. The seed of revolution sprouts only when very large numbers have a common grievance.

One reason for the law-making mania is, unquestionably, that the average citizen has at present little protection at law. The rules of evidence, the possibility of numberless appeals on trivial technicalities, the whole weary course of judicial procedure, make of the law a game in which the man with the largest purse is sure to win. Such a mass of absurd conventions and technicalities has grown up that people say, with some fairness, that the cleverness of the lawyer, not the justice of the cause, or that the rules of the game, determine the result. Some of the courts, moreover, have calendars so overburdened that no new case can reach them for years to come. The bar quite clearly realizes the situation and is foremost in de

manding reform, and is taking active measures to bring it about. The people demand, not reform-they do not understand what is to be reformed but relief, and they would find it in a curtailment of judicial power; until that can be achieved, in the enactment of precise and, as they hope, easily interpreted laws.

It is no longer enough, however, that these laws should be precise. They must, to satisfy the popular clamor, be clearly favorable to one section of the people, the laboring class, as against another section, the capitalist class. The ancient idea of special privilege must be retained, but reversed in application. One often hears it said that the labor problem in America is not as serious as it is in England, and although this may at the moment be true, it bids fair within a few years to be far more serious. The explanation of this is not difficult to find. America, more than any other country, has gone mad during the last century over the idea of material progress. Wealth has increased to an almost inconceivable degree. Railroads have penetrated all parts of the land, and with ease of transportation, factories have everywhere sprung into being. But agriculture has not kept pace with machinery. Consequently the population has tended more and more to focus itself in the cities where the

opportunities seemed greatest. Colossal fortunes have been made, but the money of the nation has fallen into the hands of comparatively few individuals. Wages have risen, but the cost of living has risen with even greater rapidity, and the result is that, although individuals may have more money than individuals of corresponding classes in Europe, the problem of living is more difficult. This is in itself enough to cause social unrest, and when in addition the population is concentrated in cities, where the poor see daily the luxury and extravagance of the rich, where the sight of innumerable artificial devices for increasing the comforts of life create correspondingly artificial needs, the motives for revolt

are violently present. To all this must be added also the fact that Americans are, contrary to the European idea of them, an intensely idealistic people. Millionaires think no longer only of building the biggest houses, but rather of building the most beautiful houses. The standard of taste is rising. Architecture is still experimental, but it strives for something more than mere show. Rich men give with a lavishness unknown in the Old World to hospitals, educational institutions, art galleries, and these gifts, made for the people, make them think more of the people, of those artificially created needs of theirs which are coming to be considered as rights. All this means a weakening of the solidarity of the upper classes, united a few years ago to defend themselves against reasonable demands, and now that there is nc longer question of resisting reasonable demands the laboring classes are united in pressing claims which ran far beyond the bounds of reason. With only feeble and spasmodic opposition special class privilege is again raising its ugly head.

All these problems, finally, are complicated by the necessity of distributing, civilizing and absorbing annually some million of ignorant immigrants; men and women, who crowd the city slums, who lower standards of living, who are always ready to swell swell the ranks of the most turbulent elements, because they expected to find in America an easy road to wealth and are disappointed. They are disappointed to find cobblestones, instead of gold paving the city streets, but in place of wealth they find almost thrust upon them American citizenship. This, in fact, is a striking example of American idealism. The practical course would be to educate the children of these ignorant immigrants, to give them American ideals, and then to make them citizens. Instead, the immigrants themselves are almost instantly given the ballot in the optimistic belief that the exercise of citizenship will, in some incomprehensible way, teach the ideals on which such

citizenship should be founded. Courageous legislators devise schemes innumerable to dam this flood of immigration, but they are powerless because these people are necessary to the revolutionary propaganda of the unions. Only Oriental exclusion is possible since the Chinese and Japanese prefer personal liberty to union domination. The European immigrants are eager to be naturalized, because they hope that the vote will somehow bring them power and riches.

She believes She believes

That the outlook is very grave no one denies. As the only solution she can devise of her own pressing questions American has chosen her paththe increase of democracy, an ever widening direct control of the majority. More and more she is throwing into the hands of the people the decision of momentous questions. She is fearful of experts. that only the people can make and interpret laws, and that a popular decision is most surely right when least influenced by those who have had experience; that only the people can reform legal procedure, determine what is and what is not class legislation, whether government or private ownership of public utilities is wiser; that the people only are competent to settle with fairness to all the grave conflict between capital and labor. When this program is complete America may be no less excellent. It will certainly be very different. It will be no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation.

So completely is this democratic remedy in the ascendant that those conservatives who dare to doubt its transcendant virtues are accused of lack of patriotism. Yet they are not alarmists. They cannot agree that the uneducated masses represent inevitably the national will. Therefore they do not consider it any lack of patriotism to criticise a government which caters only for this part of the population, carries out the will of this part only. They feel themselves, as patriots, no more bound to submit unhesitatingly to the dictates of what they believe an unrepresentative majority

than they would to bow before the rule of a single "hero." They disprove of such sudden, carelessly considered and radical changes as were brought about by the new tariff law, but in such a measure they see no national menace. Here and there an industry is destroyed which might have adjusted itself to a gradual reduction of the tariff, but, although unsettling to business in general, they realize that such local failures are not indicative of a national decline of credit. The wealth of the nation is not decreased. Capital must merely be readjusted and redistributed. What they really fear, and see looming in the distance, is a general government throttling of all business, the certain result of a long enough continued series of regulations which aim to benefit the man below by tying the hands of the man above. They see the rewards of his industry taken away from the industrious man and distributed among those who hunger and thirst after the wealth of others, but who are too lazy or too ignorant to build up a competence for themselves. They see success made almost criminal. In the meantime they watch the price of living climb higher and higher. Their own dividends are diminished year by year; they give freely to help the poor; and all the time they realize what the poor, who are the majority and therefore the lawmakers, are unable to understand, that so long as taxes rise to meet the growing extravagance of local and national governments, their own power to aid is diminished and the necessities of life grow no cheaper. They cry out the truism that to be great a nation must be prosperous, that no laws are remedies which are not the outgrowth of custom, that a nation can grow sanely and strongly only when it conforms to the changeless law of Nature, sets itself inalterably against vice and oppression-whether that oppression be exerted by an individual or by the masses, and acknowledges the sacredness of individual liberty wherever that divine right is honestly and honorably exercised.