the
monotonous measures of its own past.

III

THE PEOPLE AND THE NATION

At the beginning of this discussion popular Sovereignty was declared to
be the essential condition of democracy; and a general account of the
nature of a constructive democratic ideal can best be brought to a close
by a definition of the meaning of the phrase, popular Sovereignty,
consistent with a nationalist interpretation of democracy. The people
are Sovereign; but who and what are the people? and how can a
many-headed Sovereignty be made to work? Are we to answer, like
Bismarck, that the "true people is an invisible multitude of
spirits--the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow"? Such an answer seems
scarcely fair to living people of to-day. On the other hand, can we
reply that the Sovereign people is constituted by any chance majority
which happens to obtain control of the government, and that the
decisions and actions of the majority are inevitably and unexceptionally
democratic? Such an assertion of the doctrine of popular Sovereignty
would bestow absolute Sovereign authority on merely a part of the
people. Majority rule, under certain prescribed conditions, is a
necessary constituent of any practicable democratic organization; but
the actions or decisions of a majority need not have any binding moral
and national authority. Majority rule is merely one means to an
extremely difficult, remote and complicated end; and it is a piece of
machinery which is peculiarly liable to get out of order. Its arbitrary
and dangerous tendencies can, as a matter of fact, be checked in many
effectual and legitimate ways, of which the most effectual is the
cherishing of a tradition, partly expressed in some body of fundamental
law, that the true people are, as Bismarck declared, in some measure an
invisible multitude of spirits--the nation of yesterday and to-morrow,
organized for its national historical mission.

The phrase popular Sovereignty is, consequently, for us Americans
equivalent to the phrase "national Sovereignty." The people are not
Sovereign as individuals. They are not Sovereign in reason and morals
even when united into a majority. They become Sovereign only in so far
as they succeed in reaching and expressing a collective purpose. But
there is no royal and unimpeachable road to the attainment of such a
collective will; and the best means a democratic people can take in
order to assert its Sovereign authority with full moral effect is to