nation,--such decisions would have precisely the same effect on public
opinion as did the Dred Scott decision. They would merely excite a
crisis, which they were intended to allay, and strengthen the hands of
the more radical critics of the existing political system.

VI

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

The changes which have been taking place in industrial and political and
social conditions have all tended to impair the consistency of feeling
characteristic of the first phase of American national democracy.
Americans are divided from one another much more than they were during
the Middle Period by differences of interest, of intellectual outlook,
of moral and technical standards, and of manner of life. Grave
inequalities of power and deep-lying differences of purpose have
developed in relation of the several primary American activities. The
millionaire, the "Boss," the union laborer, and the lawyer, have all
taken advantage of the loose American political organization to promote
somewhat unscrupulously their own interests, and to obtain special
sources of power and profit at the expense of a wholesome national
balance. But the foregoing examples of specialized organization and
purposes do not stand alone. They are the most conspicuous and the most
troublesome because of the power wielded by those particular classes,
and because they can claim for their purposes the support of certain
aspects of the American national tradition. Yet the same process has
been taking place in all the other departments of American social and
intellectual life. Technical experts of all kinds--engineers, men of
letters, and artists--have all of them been asserting much more
vigorously their own special interests and purposes. In so asserting
themselves they cannot claim the support of the American national
democratic convention. On the contrary, the proclamation of high
technical standards and of insistent individual purposes is equivalent
to a revolt from the traditions of the Middle Period, which were all in
favor of cheap work and the average worker. But different as is the
situation of these technical experts, the fundamental meaning of their
self-assertion is analogous to that of the millionaire and the "Boss."
The vast incoherent mass of the American people is falling into definite
social groups, which restrict and define the mental outlook and social
experience of their members. The all-round man of the innocent Middl