Any disloyalty to democracy on the part of American national policy
would in the end prove fatal to American national unity.
The American democracy can, consequently, safely trust its genuine
interests to the keeping of those who represent the national interest.
It both can do so, and it must do so. Only by faith in an efficient
national organization and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the
national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good. If the
American local commonwealths had not been wrought by the Federalists
into the form of a nation, they would never have continued to be
democracies; and the people collectively have become more of a democracy
in proportion as they have become more of a nation. Their democracy is
to be realized by means of an intensification of their national life,
just as the ultimate moral purpose of an individual is to be realized by
the affirmation and intensification of its own better individuality.
Consequently the organization of the American democracy into a nation is
not to be regarded in the way that so many Americans have regarded
it,--as a necessary but hazardous surrender of certain liberties in
order that other liberties might be better preserved,--as a mere
compromise between the democratic ideal and the necessary conditions of
political cohesion and efficiency.
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