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.  A democracy of individual rights, that is, must either suffer reconstruction by the logic of a process of efficient national organization, or else it may pervert that organization to the service of its own ambiguous, contradictory, and in the end subversive political purposes.  A better justification for these statements must be reserved for the succeeding chapter; but in the meantime I will take the risk asserting that Mr. Roosevelt’s nationalism really implies a democracy of individual and social improvement.  His nationalizing programme has in effect questioned the value of certain fundamental American ideas, and if Mr. Roosevelt has not himself outgrown these ideas, his misreading of his own work need not be a matter of surprise.  It is what one would expect from the prophet of the Strenuous Life.

Mr. Roosevelt has done little to encourage candid and consistent thinking.  He has preached the doctrine that the paramount and almost the exclusive duty of the American citizen consists in being a sixty-horse-power moral motor-car.  In his own career his intelligence has been the handmaid of his will; and the balance between those faculties, so finely exemplified in Abraham Lincoln, has been destroyed by sheer exuberance of moral energy.  But although his intelligence is merely the servant of his will, it is at least the willing and competent servant of a single-minded master.  If it has not been leavened by the rigorous routine of its work, neither has it been cheapened; and the service has constantly been growing better worth while.  During the course of his public career, his original integrity of character has been