No formula, reconciling the individual and the popular
interest, can be devised which will work automatically. The
reconciliation must always remain a matter of victorious individual or
national contrivance. But it is none the less true that the chance of
fruitful reconciliation always exists, and in a democracy it should
exist under peculiarly wholesome conditions. The essential nature of a
democracy compels it to insist that individual power of all kinds,
political, economic, or intellectual, shall not be perversely and
irresponsibly exercised. The individual democrat is obliged no less to
insist in his own interest that the responsible exercise of power shall
not be considered equivalent to individual mediocrity and dependence.
These two demands will often conflict; but the vitality of a democracy
hangs upon its ability to keep both of them vigorous and assertive. Just
in so far as individual democrats find ways of asserting their
independence in the very act of redeeming their responsibility, the
social body of which they form a part is marching toward the goal of
human betterment.
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