In the case of our own country, however, a balance is not to be struck merely by the process of compromise in the interest of harmony.  Our forbears tried that method in dealing with the slavery problem from 1820 to 1850, and we all know with what results.  American national cohesion is a matter of national integrity; and national integrity is a matter of loyalty to the requirements of a democratic ideal.  For better or worse the American people have proclaimed themselves to be a democracy, and they have proclaimed that democracy means popular economic, social, and moral emancipation.  The only way to regain their national balance is to remove those obstacles which the economic development of the country has placed in the path of a better democratic fulfillment.  The economic and social changes of the past generation have brought out a serious and a glaring contradiction between the demands of a constructive democratic ideal and the machinery of methods and institutions, which have been considered sufficient for its realization.  This is the fundamental discrepancy which must be at least partially eradicated before American national integrity can be triumphantly re-affirmed.  The cohesion, which is a condition of effective nationality, is endangered by such a contradiction, and as long as it exists the different elements composing American society will be pulling apart rather than together.  The national principle becomes a principle of reform and reconstruction, precisely because national consistency is constantly demanding the solution of contradictory economic and political tendencies, brought out by alterations in the conditions of economic and political efficiency.  Its function is not only to preserve a balance among these diverse tendencies, but to make that balance more than ever expressive of a consistent and constructive democratic ideal.  Any disloyalty to democracy on the part of American national policy would in the end prove fatal to American national unity.

The American democracy can, consequently, safely trust its genuine interests to the keeping of those who represent the national interest.  It both can do so, and it must do so.  Only by faith in an efficient national organization and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good.  If the American local commonwealths had not been wrought by the Federalists into the form of a nation, they would never have continued to be democracies; and the people collectively have become more of a democracy in proportion as they have become more of a nation.  Their democracy is to be realized by means of an intensification of their national life, just as the ultimate moral purpose of an individual is to be realized by the affirmation and intensification of its own better individuality.  Consequently the organization of the American democracy into a nation is not to be regarded in the way that so many Americans have regarded it,—­as