In truth, Mr. Roosevelt has been building either better than he knows or
better than he cares to admit. The real meaning of his programme is more
novel and more radical than he himself has publicly proclaimed. It
implies a conception of democracy and its purpose very different from
the Jeffersonian doctrine of equal rights. Evidences of deep antagonism
can be discerned between the Hamiltonian method and spirit, represented
by Mr. Roosevelt, and a conception of democracy which makes it consist
fundamentally in the practical realization of any system of equal
rights. The distrust with which thorough-going Jeffersonians regard Mr.
Roosevelt's nationalizing programme is a justifiable distrust, because
efficient and responsible national organization would be dangerous
either to or in the sort of democracy which the doctrine of equal rights
encourages--a democracy of suspicious discontent, of selfish claims, of
factious agitation, and of individual and class aggression. A thoroughly
responsible and efficient national organization would be dangerous in
such a democracy, because it might well be captured by some combination
of local individual or class interests; and the only effective way to
guard against such a danger is to substitute for the Jeffersonian
democracy of individual rights a democracy of individual and social
improvement.
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