of the community must not be endangered by any inefficiency of the government as a whole.  The only method whereby these complicated and, in a measure, conflicting ends could be attained was by a system of checks and balances, which would make the executive, legislative, and judicial departments of the government independent of one another, while at the same time endowing each department with all the essentials of efficient action within its own sphere.  But such a method of political organization was calculated to thwart the popular will, just in so far as that will did not conform to what the Federalists believed to be the essentials of a stable political and social order.  It was antagonistic to democracy as that word was then, and is still to a large extent, understood.

The extent of this antagonism to democracy, if not in intention at least in effect, is frequently over-rated.  The antagonism depends upon the identification of democracy with a political organization for expressing immediately and completely the will of the majority—­whatever that will may be; and such a conception of democracy contains only part of the truth.  Nevertheless the founders of the Constitution did succeed in giving some effect to their distrust of the democratic principle, no matter how conservatively defined; and this was at once a grave error on their part and a grave misfortune for the American state.  Founded as the national government is, partly on a distrust of the American democracy, it has always tended to make the democracy somewhat suspicious of the national government.  This mutual suspicion, while it has been limited in scope and diminished by the action of time, constitutes a manifest impediment to the efficient action of the American political system.  The great lesson of American political experience, as we shall see, is rather that of interdependence than of incompatibility between an efficient national organization and a group of radical democratic institutions and ideals; and the meaning of this lesson has been obscured, because the Federal organization has not been constituted in a sufficiently democratic spirit, and because, consequently, it has tended to provoke distrust on the part of good democrats.  At every stage in the history of American political ideas and practice we shall meet with the unfortunate effects of this partial antagonism.

The error of the Federalists can, however, be excused by many extenuating circumstances.  Democracy as an ideal was misunderstood in 1786, and it was possessed of little or no standing in theory or tradition.  Moreover, the radical American democrats were doing much to deserve the misgivings of the Federalists.  Their ideas were narrow, impracticable, and hazardous; and they were opposed to the essential political need of the time—­viz. the constitution of an efficient Federal government.  The Federalists may have misinterpreted and perverted the proper purpose of American national organization, but they could