Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/282

Rh to be made on business principles comes from the long tradition that politics belong to another sphere from business and ought to be controlled by other principles. As the people have not yet learned to apply the test of fitness to elected officers, they can hardly complain that it is not yet applied to appointed ones. The right to be chosen to office, or the passive electoral right, is valued by every citizen, and if rightly understood it ought to be valued. A moment's reflection will show, however, that there is no absolute right of the kind. The only right which exists is that of every man, without regard to birth, wealth, or other conditions of life, to qualify himself for public honor and trust, and to be privileged of election or appointment if he be qualified. If the absolute right be affirmed without the condition, the state must continually suffer from bad service simply to gratify the vanity and ambition of certain men. It is only natural, however, that men should forget or ignore the troublesome condition, and when they do the dogmas of rotation in office and of frequent elections naturally follow. Those men, therefore, who said there were a thousand men in a certain county who were as good as the incumbent of a certain office, and that he ought to be turned out on that account, spoke with perfect good faith; the same notion has prevailed in all democracies and it has always led inevitably to the distribution of offices by lot.

The sovereignty, in the meantime, remains with the popular majority. In any true conception of the nation the sovereignty of the majority is a different thing from the sovereignty of the people. The sovereignty of the people is an expression for the assent of the nation to the course of national affairs, for the power of the people to give direc-