with its skillful utilization of expert knowledge, while admitting the public to full knowledge of what is going on, and full ultimate control of it?  We evidently think so, and our present tendencies are evidence that we are attempting something of the kind.  Our belief seems to be that if we elect our despot and are able to recall him we shall have to keep tab on him pretty closely, and that the knowledge of statecraft that will thus be necessary to us will be no less than if we personally took part in legislation and administration—­probably far more than if we simply went through the form of delegating our responsibilities and then took no further thought, as most of us have been accustomed to do.

Whether this is the right view or not—­whether it is workable—­the future will show; I am here discussing tendencies, not their ultimate outcome.  But it would be too much to expect that this or any other eclectic policy should be pleasing to all.

“The real problem of collectivism,” says Walter Lippmann, “is the difficulty of combining popular control with administrative power....  The conflict between democracy and centralized authority ... is the line upon which the problems of collectivism will be fought out.”

In selecting elements from both despotism and democracy we are displeasing the adherents of both.  There is too much despotism in the plan for one side and too much democracy for the other.  We constantly hear the complaint that concentrated responsibility with popular control is too despotic, and at the same time the criticism that it is too democratic.  To put your city in the hands of a small commission, perhaps of a city manager, seems to some to be a return to monarchy; and so perhaps it is.  To give Tom, Dick and Harry the power to unseat these monarchs at will is said to be dangerously socialistic; and possibly it is.  Only it is possible that by combining these two poisons—­this acid and this alkali—­in the same pill, we are neutralizing their harmful qualities.  At any rate this would seem to be the idea on which we are now proceeding.

We may now examine the effects of this tendency toward eclecticism in quite a different field—­that of morals.  Among the settlers of our country were both Puritans and Cavaliers—­representatives in England of two moral standards that have contended there for centuries and still exist there side by side.  We in America are attempting to mix them with some measure of success.  This was detected by the German lady of whom Mr. Bryce tells in his “American Commonwealth,” who said that American women were “furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm”—­frightfully free and frightfully pious!  In other words they are trying to mix the Cavalier and Puritan standards.  Of course those who do not understand what is going on think that we are either too free or too pious.  We are neither; we are trying to give and accept freedom in cases where freedom works for moral efficiency and restraint