INTRODUCTION
The plan for state and municipal governments generally accepted in the United States in the middle period of the nineteenth century gave great satisfaction in the provincial and frontier communities where it was adopted and which then composed the principal part of the United States. In many nooks and corners of the country today we have relics of this provincial and frontier society. In such districts this plan for state and municipal governments is entirely satisfactory in practice. To depart from it would be unwise, for the reason that in matters of government that which is and which is not positively objectionable should be let alone. Frequently men of talent and power, whose youth was spent in the provincial and frontier era of our social and political development, still find conditions about them not so much changed. To them the mid-nineteenth-century plan and its practice are entirely satisfactory. Any criticism of it would at once meet with a vigorous and, no doubt, from the point of view of provincial and frontier conditions, a complete defense. To the inhabitants of those parts of the United States where such provincial and frontier conditions still exist the following essay is not addressed.
So long as the more simple and primitive conditions of society which obtained in the first half of the nineteenth century were all but universal in the United States, any criticism of the plan of state and municipal government which prevailed was a purely academic exercise. Even when, in some districts, conditions had changed and great cities had arisen with enormous wealth and population, to which the mid-nineteenth-century plan of government did not seem to fit in practice, the majority were still so far satisfied as to make any criticism of that plan of merely speculative value. But in the second decade of the twentieth century the provincial and frontier type of society will be found to embrace a distinct minority of the population of the country. The social conditions presented by a large population in a small area, with a highly organized and differentiated social structure, have become common to a large portion of the population of the entire country. Whether the application of a mid-nineteenth-century plan of government to these conditions is satisfactory is, therefore, no longer an academic or speculative question. Its due consideration has perhaps rather become to the last degree vital to the life of the nation. To those who are face to face with this problem the following essay is addressed.
PART I
THE RISE OF THE POLITOCRATS
CHAPTER I
UNPOPULAR GOVERNMENT—DEFINED—HOW FORMERLY MAINTAINED—PRECAUTIONS TAKEN TO AVOID IT
Unpopular government is, and indeed always has been, a government of the few, by the few, and for the few, at the expense and against the wish of the many.
In a former era unpopular government was achieved and maintained with simple directness. All governmental power was, by a monarchical or oligarchical plan, openly placed in the hands of the few. Human characteristics insured the selfish use of that power. The maintenance of such selfish use of governmental power against the wish of the majority was accomplished by denying any legal opportunity to the majority to express itself, and by the perpetuation of power in the hands of the few by inheritance or appointment.
The makers of our mid-nineteenth-century state and municipal governments undertook to free this land from unpopular government. If all governments must be tyrannical from the point of view of some, they preferred the tyranny of the majority to the tyranny of the minority. Their aim was to establish and maintain a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as distinguished from a government of the few, by the few, and for the few, at the expense of the many and against their wish. They could not, however, change human characteristics. The tendency, therefore, to use power selfishly continued. They did endeavor to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of the few by splitting the power of government up among many separate and distinct offices and limiting the power which any one officeholder might exercise. They sought to make impossible the retention of power in the face of popular disapproval by requiring all offices of importance in the government to be filled by popular election and the elections to be held frequently. For the greater part of a century these ways and means of heading off unpopular government have been constantly employed in the development of our state and municipal governments. The belief of the people in popular government has become a belief in these two means of obtaining it. In popular estimation the means have become the end. Inevitably these expedients for securing immunity from unpopular government have been pressed to great extremes.