enterprise. We are trying to look beneath the
surface and to inquire whether there are not factors of heredity and
race more fundamental than those of education and environment. We find
that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by
but one of the many races and peoples which have come within their
practical operation, and that that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon,
developed them out of its own insular experience unhampered by inroads
of alien stock. When once thus established in England and further
developed in America we find that other races and peoples, accustomed to
despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have
been thrust into the delicate fabric. Like a practical people as we
pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in
order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically
holding that we retain the original democracy. The earlier problem was
mainly a political one--how to unite into one self-governing nation a
scattered population with the wide diversity of natural resources,
climates, and interests that mark a country soon to stretch from ocean
to ocean and from the arctics to the subtropics. The problem now is a
social one,--how to unite into one people a congeries of races even more
diverse than the resources and climates from which they draw their
subsistence. That motto, "_E pluribus unum_," which in the past has
guided those who through constitutional debate and civil war worked out
our form of government, must now again be the motto of those who would
work out the more fundamental problem of divergent races. Here is
something deeper than the form of government--it is the essence of
government--for it is that union of the hearts and lives and abilities
of the people which makes government what it really is.

The conditions necessary for democratic government are not merely the
constitutions and laws which guarantee equality, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, for these after all are but paper documents. They
are not merely freedom from foreign power, for the Australian colonies
enjoy the most democratic of all governments, largely because they are
owned by another country which has protected them from foreign and civil
wars. Neither are wealth and prosperity necessary for democracy, for
these may tend to luxury, inequality, and envy. World power, however
glorious and enticing, is not helpful to democracy, for