and lucrative addition to their market. But it must be
remembered that the alliance was founded on interest rather than
association, on mutual agreement rather than on any effective
subordination one to another. A certain change in conditions might
easily make their separate interests diverge, and abstract all the
profits from their traffic. If anything happened, for instance, to make
inter-state railroad corporations less dependent on the state
governments, they would no longer need the expense of subsidizing the
state machines. There are signs at the present time that these interests
are diverging, and that such alliances will be less dangerous in the
future than they have been in the past. But even if the alliance is
broken, the peculiar unofficial organization of American industry and
politics will persist, and will constitute, both in its consequences and
its significance, two of our most important national problems.

It would be as grave a mistake, however, absolutely to condemn this
process of political organization as it would absolutely to condemn the
process of industrial organization. The huge corporation and the
political machine were both created to satisfy a real and a permanent
need--the needs of specialized leadership and associated action in these
two primary American activities. That in both of these cases the actual
method of organization has threatened vital public interests, and even
the very future of democracy has been due chiefly to the disregard by
the official American political system of the necessity and the
consequences of specialized leadership and associated action. The
political system was based on the assumption that the individualism it
encouraged could be persuaded merely by the power of words to respect
the public interest, that public officials could be deprived of
independence and authority for the real benefit of the "plain people,"
and that the "plain people" would ask nothing from the government but
their legal rights. These assumptions were all erroneous; and when
associated action and specialized leadership became necessary in local
American politics, the leaders and their machine took advantage of the
defective official system to build up an unofficial system, better
suited to actual popular needs. The "people" wanted the government to do
something for them, and the politicians made their living and served
their country by satisfying the want. To be sure, the "people" they
be