The favored minority, feeling as they do tolerably sure
of their position, can scarcely avoid a habit of making it somewhat too
easy for one another. The political, economic, and intellectual leaders
begin to be selected without any sufficient test of their efficiency.
Some sort of a test continues to be required; but the standards which
determine it drift into a condition of being narrow, artificial, and
lax. Political, intellectual, and social leadership, in order to
preserve its vitality needs a feeling of effective responsibility to a
body of public opinion as wide, as varied, and as exacting as that of
the whole community.
The desirable democratic object, implied in the traditional democratic
demand for equality, consists precisely in that of bestowing a share of
the responsibility and the benefits, derived from political and economic
association, upon the whole community. Democracies have assumed and have
been right in assuming that a proper diffusion of effective
responsibility and substantial benefits is the one means whereby a
community can be supplied with an ultimate and sufficient bond of union.
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