The effect of a belief in the principle of “equal rights” on freedom is, however, most clearly shown by its attitude toward Democratic political organization and policy.  A people jealous of their rights are not sufficiently afraid of special individual efficiency and distinction to take very many precautions against it.  They greet it oftener with neglect than with positive coercion.  Jeffersonian Democracy is, however, very much afraid of any examples of associated efficiency.  Equality of rights is most in clanger of being violated when the exercise of rights is associated with power, and any unusual amount of power is usually derived from the association of a number of individuals for a common purpose.  The most dangerous example of such association is not, however, a huge corporation or a labor union; it is the state.  The state cannot be bound hand and foot by the law, as can a corporation, because it necessarily possesses some powers of legislation; and the power to legislate inevitably escapes the limitation of the principle of equal rights.  The power to legislate implies the power to discriminate; and the best way consequently for a good democracy of equal rights to avoid the danger of discrimination will be to organize the state so that its power for ill will be rigidly restricted.  The possible preferential interference on the part of a strong and efficient government must be checked by making the government feeble and devoid of independence.  The less independent and efficient the several departments of the government are permitted to become, the less likely that the government as a whole will use its power for anything but a really popular purpose.

In the foregoing type of political organization, which has been very much favored by the American democracy, the freedom of the official political leader is sacrificed for the benefit of the supposed freedom of that class of equalized individuals known as the “people,” but by the “people” Jefferson and his followers have never meant all the people or the people as a whole.  They have meant a sort of apotheosized majority—­the people in so far as they could be generalized and reduced to an average.  The interests of this class were conceived as inimical to any discrimination which tended to select peculiarly efficient individuals or those who were peculiarly capable of social service.  The system of equal rights, particularly in its economic and political application has worked for the benefit of such a class, but rather in its effect upon American intelligence and morals, than in its effect upon American political and economic development.  The system, that is, has only partly served the purpose of its founder and his followers, and it has failed because it did not bring with it any machinery adequate even to its own insipid and barren purposes.  Even the meager social interest which Jefferson concealed under cover of his demand for equal rights could not be promoted without