Nowhere is this more obvious than in our political life as it manifests itself in certain quarters of every great city.  It is most difficult to hold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a social expression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take pains to keep on common ground in our human experiences.  Otherwise there is in various parts of the community an inevitable difference of ethical standards which becomes responsible for much misunderstanding.

It is difficult both to interpret sympathetically the motives and ideals of those who have acquired rules of conduct in experience widely different from our own, and also to take enough care in guarding the gains already made, and in valuing highly enough the imperfect good so painfully acquired and, at the best, so mixed with evil.  This wide difference in daily experience exhibits itself in two distinct attitudes toward politics.  The well-to-do men of the community think of politics as something off by itself; they may conscientiously recognize political duty as part of good citizenship, but political effort is not the expression of their moral or social life.  As a result of this detachment, “reform movements,” started by business men and the better element, are almost wholly occupied in the correction of political machinery and with a concern for the better method of administration, rather than with the ultimate purpose of securing the welfare of the people.  They fix their attention so exclusively on methods that they fail to consider the final aims of city government.  This accounts for the growing tendency to put more and more responsibility upon executive officers and appointed commissions at the expense of curtailing the power of the direct representatives of the voters.  Reform movements tend to become negative and to lose their educational value for the mass of the people.  The reformers take the role of the opposition.  They give themselves largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, to writing and talking of what the future must be and of certain results which should be obtained.  In trying to better matters, however, they have in mind only political achievements which they detach in a curious way from the rest of life, and they speak and write of the purification of politics as of a thing set apart from daily life.

On the other hand, the real leaders of the people are part of the entire life of the community which they control, and so far as they are representative at all, are giving a social expression to democracy.  They are often politically corrupt, but in spite of this they are proceeding upon a sounder theory.  Although they would be totally unable to give it abstract expression, they are really acting upon a formulation made by a shrewd English observer; namely, that, “after the enfranchisement of the masses, social ideals enter into political programmes, and they enter not as something which at best can be indirectly promoted by government, but as something which it is the chief business of government to advance directly.”