ociety, is not only exclusive of
many partial and erroneous ideas, but demands both a reconstructive
programme and an efficient organization. A government by the people,
which seeks an organization and a policy beneficial to the individual
and to society, is confronted by a task as responsible and difficult as
you please; but it is a specific task which demands the adoption of
certain specific and positive means. Moreover it is a task which the
American democracy has never sought consciously to achieve. American
democrats have always hoped for individual and social amelioration as
the result of the operation of their democratic system; but if any such
result was to follow, its achievement was to be a happy accident. The
organization and policy of a democracy should leave the individual and
society to seek their own amelioration. The democratic state should
never discriminate in favor of anything or anybody. It should only
discriminate against all sorts of privilege. Under the proposed
definition, on the other hand, popular government is to make itself
expressly and permanently responsible for the amelioration of the
individual and society; and a necessary consequence of this
responsibility is an adequate organization and a reconstructive policy.

The majority of good Americans will doubtless consider that the
reconstructive policy, already indicated, is flagrantly socialistic both
in its methods and its objects; and if any critic likes to fasten the
stigma of socialism upon the foregoing conception of democracy, I am not
concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of
democracy is socialistic, if it is socialistic to consider democracy
inseparable from a candid, patient, and courageous attempt to advance
the social problem towards a satisfactory solution. It is also
socialistic in case socialism cannot be divorced from the use, wherever
necessary, of the political organization in all its forms to realize the
proposed democratic purpose. On the other hand, there are some doctrines
frequently associated with socialism, to which the proposed conception
of democracy is wholly inimical; and it should be characterized not so
much socialistic, as unscrupulously and loyally nationalistic.

A democracy dedicated to individual and social betterment is necessarily
individualist as well as socialist. It has little interest in the mere
multiplication of average individuals, except in so far as such
multipli