His wife, up till some fourth of March an elderly country woman grown dull in the monotony of village life or worn with the task of pushing an unambitious husband forward to power, looking her most natural when in the frankness of early morning unpreparedness she ran in her apron across the street to gossip with the wife of a neighbor, becomes to the awed eyes of Washington women, quite "beautiful." You hear them say it of every—let us quote the illuminating phrase—every "first lady of the land."
When Burke said that aristocracy was the most natural thing in the world he did not go half far enough. The most natural thing in the world, the thing which is always repeating itself under no matter whatever form of government exists, is an autocracy. In national emergencies, in times of peril, people put their fate in one man's hands; as in the late war when Mr. Wilson was made by common consent a greater autocrat than any Czar of all the Russias.
The herd instinctively follows one authority. The mob is single-headed. All the traditions of the race lead back toward despotism and it is easier to revert toward something primitive than to go forward toward something higher in the scale of development.
And, moreover, the vital contacts of our lives are with authority imposed from above. Our childhood is controlled by the autocracy of the family. Education disposes of our hours, forces our inclinations, represses our individuality, and turns us out stamped with a uniform mark, the finished product of its unvarying course. The single head of the classroom is the teacher. The single head of the school is the principal, of all the schools the Superintendent.
More important still, our economic lives are at the disposal of autocracy. We earn our livings under foremen and managers. Everywhere is the boss who says to us "Do this or starve." He represents to us not only authority but wisdom. The organization out of which proceeds to us the beneficent results of food and clothing operates because he is endowed with a knowledge which we have not. "He knows about it all, he knows, he knows."
In all the essential everyday relations of life we have never been able to evolve any higher organization than that of the chieftain and his tribe. We read about democracy in the newspapers; once every two years or every four years we go through certain motions which vaguely relate to democracy, and which are not convincing motions.
Democracy is an artificial edifice imposed upon a society which is in all other than its political aspects entirely primitive. All our direct experiences are of one man power. It is the only organization we actually know at first hand. We trust to it for the means to live. We revert to it politically whenever it becomes an issue of life and death, and even in lesser emergencies.
So it came about that when we determined to have a government at Washington independent of and better representing the social will, whatever that might come to be, than the government of business we had recourse to that one form of rule which is ever present in our consciousness, the only form under which the race has lived long enough to have any real faith in it.
The new social ideal had not sufficiently taken form to utilize all the complex institutions which existed in this country. Business was at that time intrenched in Congress. It would have been a huge, an impossible task, to re-make Congress, especially when no one knew definitely what purpose should animate the re-making. It was so much easier to find one man than to find many men. It is so much easier for a people which does not know where it is going but means to go there to choose one man, and by an act of faith endow him with the divination of leadership, than it is to have a national will and express it through numerous representatives.
The amplified executive is a sort of blind pool of the national purposes. Creating an autocracy is an act of faith; democracy is work. And faith is so much easier than work.