All phenomena of government are phenomena of groups pressing one another, forming one another, and pushing out new groups and group representatives (the organs or agencies of government) to mediate the adjustments. It is only as we isolate these group activities, determine their representative values, and get the whole process stated in terms of them that we approach to a satisfactory knowledge of government.
When we take such an agency of government as a despotic ruler, we cannot possibly advance to an understanding of him except in terms of the group activities of his society which are most directly represented through him, along with those which almost seem not to be represented through him at all, or to be represented to a different degree or in a different manner. And it is the same with democracies, even in their "purest" and simplest forms, as well as in their most complicated forms. We cannot fairly talk of despotisms or of democracies as though they were absolutely distinct types of government to be contrasted offhand with each other or with other types. All depends for each despotism and each democracy and each other form of government on the given interests, their relations, and their methods of interaction. The interest groups create the government and work through it; the government, as activity, works "for" the groups; the government, from the viewpoint of certain of the groups, may at times be their private tool; the government, from the viewpoint of others of the groups, seems at times their deadly enemy; but the process is all one, and the joint participation is always present, however it may be phrased in public opinion or clamor.
It is convenient most of the time in studying government to talk of these groups as interests. But I have already indicated with sufficient clearness that the interest is nothing other than the group activity itself. The words by which we name the interests often give the best expression to the value of the group activities in terms of other group activities: if I may be permitted that form of phrasing, they are more qualitative than quantitative in their implications. But that is sometimes a great evil as well as sometimes an advantage. We must always remember that there is nothing in the interests purely because of themselves and that we can depend on them only as they stand for groups which are acting or tending toward activity or pressing themselves along in their activity with other groups.
When we get the group activities on the lower planes worked out and show them as represented in various forms of higher groups, culminating in the political groups, then we make progress in our interpretations. Always and everywhere our study must be a study of the interests that work through government; otherwise we have not got down to facts. Nor will it suffice to take a single interest group and base our interpretation upon it, not even for a special time and a special place. No interest group has meaning except with reference to other interest groups; and those other interest groups are pressures; they count in the government process. The lowest of despised castes, deprived of rights to the protection of property and even life, will still be found to be a factor in the government, if only we can sweep the whole field and measure the caste in its true degree of power, direct or represented, in its potentiality of harm to the higher castes, and in its identification with them for some important purposes, however deeply hidden from ordinary view. No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government. They are an interest group within it.
Tested by the interest groups that function through them, legislatures are of two general types. First are those which represent one class or set of classes in the government as opposed to some other class, which is usually represented in a monarch. Second are those which are not the exclusive stronghold of one class or set of classes, but are instead the channel for the functioning of all groupings of the population. The borders between the two types are of course indistinct, but they approximate closely to the borders between a society with class organization and one with classes broken down into freer and more changeable group interests.
Neither the number of chambers in the legislative body nor the constitutional relations of the legislature to the executive can serve to define the two types. The several chambers may represent several classes, or again the double-chamber system may be in fact merely a technical division, with the same interests present in both chambers. The executive may be a class representative, or merely a co-ordinate organ, dividing with the legislature the labor of providing channels through which the same lot of manifold interest groups can work.
It lies almost on the surface that a legislature which is a class agency will produce results in accordance with the class pressure behind it. Its existence has been established by struggle, and its life is a continual struggle against the representatives of the opposite class. Of course there will be an immense deal of argument to be heard on both sides, and the argument will involve the setting forth of "reasons" in limitless number. It is indeed because of the advantages (in group terms, of course) of such argument as a technical means of adjustment that the legislative bodies survive. Argument under certain conditions is a greater labor-saver than blows, and in it the group interests more fully unfold themselves. But beneath all the argument lies the strength. The arguments go no farther than the strength goes. What the new Russian duma will get, if it survives, will be what the people it solidly represents are strong enough to make it get, and no more and no less, with bombs and finances, famine and corruption funds alike in the scale.
But the farther we advance among legislatures of the second type, and the farther we get away from the direct appeal to muscle and weapon, the more difficult becomes the analysis of the group components, the greater is the prominence that falls to the process of argumentation, the more adroitly do the group forces mask themselves in morals, ideals, and phrases, the more plausible becomes the interpretation of the legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence interest group is wholly inadequate.