have fought and that he will persevere in every one of the great governmental policies in which I most firmly believe. Therefore, nothing whatever is lost by my having refused to run for a third term, and much is gained. Washington and Lincoln set the standard of conduct for the public servants of this people. They showed how men of the strongest type could also possess all the disinterestedness, all the unselfish devotion to duty and to the interests of their fellow countrymen that we have a right to expect, but can only hope to see in the very highest type of public servant. At however great a distance, I have been anxious to follow in their footsteps, and anxious that, however great the difference in degree, my service to the Nation should be approximately the same in kind as theirs." With this prophecy of his successor's course (so strangely compounded of truth and error) and with this estimate of his own services (in which conscious merit and becoming modesty are so naïvely blended) Theodore Roosevelt passed for a brief moment from the stage of public affairs.

CHAPTER VII

THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results.-ROBERT M. LA FOLLETTE

SHALL THE PEOPLE RULE?1

Democracy means literally "the rule of the people." But the phrase is a maxim of political theory, not a program of government. How shall the rule of the people be put into operation? In a New England town or a tiny Swiss canton the qualified citizens can meet in a body to elect officers and to propose, debate, and pass the laws governing their communities; but as the size of the political unit grows, it is obvious that only a decreasing proportion of the people can actually take part in governing. About sixty-eight hundred men (one out of sixteen thousand of our population), sitting at Washington and the various state capitals, frame the laws for the country at large and the forty-eight commonwealths of the Union. "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people," was the summary definition of democracy made by Abraham Lincoln and by Daniel Webster before him. . It is an inspiring ideal. But on sober analysis the prepositions in the phrase are seen to admit of different interpretations. Government of the people may mean a government arising from the people or one controlling the people; government for the people may mean a government in the interests of the people or one in lieu of the people. Government by the people and government for the people can easily be interpreted as contradictory terms. The benevolent autocrats from Peisistratus to Napoleon III have in

1 I am indebted to Professor Everett Kimball's admirable book "State and Municipal Government of the United States" for many of the illustrations in this section.

sisted that their government was for the people, and even of the people. On the other hand, the Jacobin despotism in the French Revolution claimed to be a government by the people, while in reality it was narrowed down to a triumvirate of dictators. The history of Russia in the last few years is a suggestive commentary on the possible interpretation of the phrase "the rule of the people."

It is an inevitable, perhaps an insoluble, problem in our democracy to determine the proper balance between the control of the people by the rulers and the control of the rulers by the people. It does not help to insist, with Jefferson, that the people are the rulers; for however true this is in theory, in practice it is not and cannot be true. If it were, there would not have been any occasion for Jefferson's own campaign to "restore the government to the people," or for the similar campaigns urged by the Jacksonian democracy, the Populists, or the Progressives. That the American people at large were ever in control of their government in a golden age of democracy, which was turned into an age of brass and iron by the adulteration of political ambition and economic oppression on the part of the powerful few, is a fiction worthy to rank with Rousseau's dream of the happy savage in the unspoiled state of nature. The farther back we go in the history of our country, the less democracy we find. The colonial governments scorned the "leveling" idea of equality. "A democracy," said John Cotton of Massachusetts, "is no fit government either for church or for commonwealth." The men who framed our Constitution agreed substantially with John Dickinson, when he urged in the Federal Convention of 1787 that an instrument of government must be framed to defend liberty against "the dangerous influence of those multitudes without property and without principle, with which our country, like all others, will in time abound." Property qualifications, religious qualifications, educational qualifications, find a place in all our early state constitutions. Not more than one male adult out of seven enjoyed the privilege of voting in George Washington's day. The fight not to "restore" but to attain democracy has been continuous in our history.

This contest has been waged in various forms at various times. Under Jefferson it was not so much for institutional reform as for the stimulation of the voters to choose magistrates who had at heart "the cherishment of the people," instead of those who claimed to be "set over them in the Lord." There was little or no agitation for the revision of constitutions, the widening of the electorate, or the introduction of "direct government." Authority must be in the hands of competent and trained statesmen. Government was a noble stewardship. Only, the stewards must be the guardians of the interests of the people at large-the farmers, the small traders, the artisans, the workmen, who actually paid for the support of the government by their taxes and labor-and not the servants of the creditors who held the government securities and were therefore interested in maintaining a permanent public debt after the fashion of Great Britain. The Jacksonian democracy was far more radical. It rejected the doctrine of stewardship and vaunted the common man as competent to govern. Education lay at the bottom of Jefferson's program. It was a potential democracy that he envisaged-a people capable of gradual training in public school, academy, and university until they appreciated the principles of Locke and Sidney that underlie free government. But for Jackson democracy was actual. The people had already "arrived." They should take possession of the government forthwith. Constitutions were therefore rewritten to extend the suffrage, to provide for elective in the place of appointive officers, and to eliminate religious, property, and educational qualifications for voters or officeholders. The offices were to be "passed around." They were to be used as spoils of victory to reward the party workers. It was the first victory of the new, self-reliant West over the aristocracy of the seaboard states. It was the beginning of a social democracy as well as a political one. After the Civil War there came another change of emphasis in the perennial contest for a larger popular voice in our government. The rapid industrial expansion of the country; the control of mills and factories by larger and larger aggregations of capital; the regulation of the money supply by

the bankers, to whom the government had turned in its extremity; the dictation of freight rates and elevator charges by the transportation companies, on whom the farmer was dependent for getting his grain to market; the absorption of the public lands by grants to the railroads; the abuse of the Homestead Act by the land speculators,-all combined to make the economic factors predominant in the post-bellum struggle for popular control. It was an industrial democracy at which the farmers and the laborers were aiming in those political movements of the eighth and ninth decades of the last century which we have studied in earlier chapters (see pages 87-101, 229-237, 280-291).

During the twenty years between the emergence of the Liberal Republican movement and the consolidation of most of the elements of radical discontent into the Populist party, the attempts to secure a larger measure of democracy had taken the form of new party organizations. A dozen "third parties" had tried to capture the government of county, state, and nation. Except for local victories, their efforts in the face of the highly organized machines had been futile. After 1892 the reform movement was carried on inside the great parties rather than outside. Many of the third parties, indeed, remained in the field, casting a small vote (never more than 6 or 7 per cent of the aggregate) at each election; but for another twenty years, until the formation of the Progressive party at Chicago in 1912, no new party appeared except the Social Democratic (1900). Populism seemed to have met a definitive defeat in 1896 after capturing the Democratic party. But it was rather the free-silver issue, on which the "Popocrats" staked their fortunes, than the general program of protest which was defeated then. The demands of the platform of 1892 on the subjects of transportation, the trusts, the public lands, the interests of the farmers, tax reform, the protection of labor, and the undue influence of big business in the government continued to be heard (in the Western communities especially), and acted as a leaven in the politics of both the great parties. For a few years, just at the turn of the century, these voices were hushed by the victory of McKinley in 1896, the prosecution of a successful foreign war, the