Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/323

304 affirmed the equality of all whites, that is, of all who were in the ring. This made them great popular leaders — of whites. If we should repeal our naturalization laws, admit no more immigrants to citizenship, restricting political power to those now here and letting them and their descendants possess it by universal manhood suffrage, we should create a democratic-aristocracy in a generation or two. Hence it is dear that a democratic-aristocracy is not a contradiction in terms.

So far then, we see, I think, that democracy in the sense of political equality for the members of the ruling race was produced in the colonies out of the necessities and circumstances of the case. No convention ever decreed it or chose it. It existed in the sense of social equality long before it was recognized and employed as a guiding principle in institutions and laws; its strength in the latter is due to the fact that it is rooted and grounded in economic facts. The current popular notion that we have democratic institutions because the men of the eighteenth century were wise enough to choose and create them is entirely erroneous. We have not made America; America has made us. There is, indeed, a constant reaction between the environment and the ideas of the people; the ideas turn into dogmas and pet notions, which in their turn are applied to the environment. What effect they have, however, except to produce confusion, error, mischief, and loss is a very serious question. The current of our age has been entirely in favor of the notion that a convention to amend the Constitution can make any kind of a state or society which we may choose as an ideal. That is a great delusion, but it is one of the leading social faiths of the present time.

I turned aside from the second sense of aristocracy