some effective organ of social responsibility; and the Democrats of to-day are obliged, as we have seen, to invoke the action of the central government to destroy those economic discriminations which its former inaction had encouraged.  But even so the traditional democracy still retains its dislike of centralized and socialized responsibility.  It consents to use the machinery of the government only for a negative or destructive object.  Such must always be the case as long as it remains true to its fundamental principle.  That principle defines the social interest merely in the terms of an indiscriminate individualism—­which is the one kind of individualism murderous to both the essential individual and the essential social interest.

The net result has been that wherever the attempt to discriminate in favor of the average or indiscriminate individual has succeeded, it has succeeded at the expense of individual liberty, efficiency, and distinction; but it has more often failed than succeeded.  Whenever the exceptional individual has been given any genuine liberty, he has inevitably conquered.  That is the whole meaning of the process of economic and social development traced in certain preceding chapters.  The strong and capable men not only conquer, but they seek to perpetuate their conquests by occupying all the strategic points in the economic and political battle-field—­whereby they obtain certain more or less permanent advantages over their fellow-democrats.  Thus in so far as the equal rights are freely exercised, they are bound to result in inequalities; and these inequalities are bound to make for their own perpetuation, and so to provoke still further discrimination.  Wherever the principle has been allowed to mean what it seems to mean, it has determined and encouraged its own violation.  The marriage which it is supposed to consecrate between liberty and equality gives birth to unnatural children, whose nature it is to devour one or the other of their parents.

The only way in which the thorough-going adherent of the principle of equal rights can treat these tendencies to discrimination, when they develop, is rigidly to repress them; and this tendency to repression is now beginning to take possession of those Americans who represent the pure Democratic tradition.  They propose to crush out the chief examples of effective individual and associated action, which their system of democracy has encouraged to develop.  They propose frankly to destroy, so far as possible, the economic organization which has been built up under stress of competitive conditions; and by assuming such an attitude they have fallen away even from the pretense of impartiality, and have come out as frankly representative of a class interest.  But even to assert this class interest efficiently they have been obliged to abandon, in fact if not in word, their correlative principle of national irresponsibility.  Whatever the national interest may be, it is not to be asserted by the political practice of non-interference.  The hope of automatic democratic fulfillment must be abandoned.  The national government must stop in and discriminate; but it must discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of equality and the average man.