ices
of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply
attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not long stay
diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies that they
worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some arrangement, hoping
against experience that a government freed from human nature will
automatically produce human benefits. To-day within the Socialist Party
there is perhaps the greatest surviving example of the desire to offset
natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith
among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I
sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their
ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the
acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among
socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative
springs anonymously out of the mass of the people,--that there are no
"leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no more influential than the
figurehead on the prow of a ship.

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves a
crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of
humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all
individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to blot
out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That there
is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it
briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not
justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we
distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent
sovereign.

Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances. Because
it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith
that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life
these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do not
become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are. When
theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a deceptive
theory of politics. If the real government of the United States "had, in
fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by mechanically
automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its
history has been rich with the influence and personalities of the men who
have