seek fullness and consistency of national life. They are Sovereign in so
far as they are united in spirit and in purpose; and they are united in
so far as they are loyal one to another, to their joint past, and to the
Promise of their future. The Promise of their future may sometimes
demand the partial renunciation of their past and the partial sacrifice
of certain present interests; but the inevitable friction of all such
sacrifices can be mitigated by mutual loyalty and good faith. Sacrifices
of tradition and interest can only be demanded in case they contribute
to the national purpose--to the gradual creation of a higher type of
individual and associated life. Hence it is that an effective increase
in national coherence looks in the direction of the democratic
consummation--of the morally and intellectually authoritative expression
of the Sovereign popular will. Both the forging and the functioning of
such a will are constructively related to the gradual achievement of the
work of individual and social amelioration.

Undesirable and inadequate forms of democracy always seek to dispense in
one way or another with this tedious process of achieving a morally
authoritative Sovereign will. We Americans have identified democracy
with certain existing political and civil rights, and we have,
consequently, tended to believe that the democratic consummation was
merely a matter of exercising and preserving those rights. The grossest
form of this error was perpetrated when Stephen A. Douglas confused
authoritative popular Sovereignty with the majority vote of a few
hundred "squatters" in a frontier state, and asserted that on democratic
principles such expressions of the popular will should be accepted as
final. But an analogous mistake lurks in all static forms of democracy.
The bestowal and the exercise of political and civil rights are merely a
method of organization, which if used in proper subordination to the
ultimate democratic purpose, may achieve in action something of the
authority of a popular Sovereign will. But to cleave to the details of
such an organization as the very essence of democracy is utterly to
pervert the principle of national democratic Sovereignty. From this
point of view, the Bourbon who wishes the existing system with its
mal-adaptations and contradictions preserved in all its lack of
integrity, commits an error analogous to that of the radical, who wishes
by virtue of a majority vote immediately t