An immense inertia develops between theoretical self-government and the practical reluctance of humanity to be governed by anything short of the heavenly hosts. I don't know whether this reluctance springs from racial modesty, the feeling that man is not good enough to govern himself, or from racial egotism, the belief that nothing is too good to govern him; but it is a great reality. The little men at Washington are will-less in the conflict.
To overcome this inertia, minorities whose interests cannot wait upon the slow benevolent processes of determinism or upon the divine rightness of public opinion, form to prod the constitutional organs of government into action. Mr. Gray Silver, the silk smoother, and Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler, the Puritan fanatic, are both just as much parts of the government as is Mr. Harding. So, too, is every one of the hundred and more lobbies which issue publicity at Washington. We recognize this plurality of our institutions in our common speech. We refer habitually to the "invisible government," to "government by business," to "party government," to "government by public opinion." We have little but inertia, except as outside pressure is applied to it.
The little men at Washington live in all this confusion of an excessively plural government. They are pushed hither and yon by all these forces, organized and unorganized, mental and physical, real and imaginary, that inhibit and impel self-government. They lean heavily upon parties only to find parties bending beneath their weight. They yield to blocs and lobbies. They watch publicity and put out their own publicity to counteract it.
Like the ministers of crowned fools, they gull the present embodiment of divine right and cringe before it. They are everything but the effective realization of a democratic will.
All this sounds as if I were getting far from my happy ending, and you begin to see me asking the old question, "Is democracy a failure?" But no, it is too soon to ask it. Wait a thousand years until democracy has had a real chance. A revolution—no really optimistic prognosis can be written which does not have the world revolution in it—a revolution will have to take place in men's minds before this is a democracy.
I would absolve myself from the taboo of this word. Property is a grand form of clothes. A property revolution, such as the Socialists recommend, would be little more important in setting men's minds free for self-government, than would putting women in trousers be in setting women's minds free for the achievement of sex equality.
Some German—I think it was Spengler—writing about some "Niedergang," I think it was of western civilization—all Germans like to write about Niedergangs—demonstrated that every new civilization starts with a new theory of the universe, of space and time. That is, it starts with a real revolution.
Well, then, here is the true happy ending; Einstein is giving us a new theory of the universe, knocking the mathematical props from under infinity, teaching us that man largely fashions the world out of his own mind.
Man again tends to become what the old Greek radical called him, "The measure of all things." Once he is, and it will take a long time for him to admit that he is, there may be a real chance for democracy and for the emergence of great individuals, who are after all the best evidence of civilization.