Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/104

, and of all professional politicians.

For all these reasons I esteem it a vanity to discuss the question whether the democracy on tap in the United States is really ideal. Ideal or not, it works, and the people are actually sovereign. The governmental process, perhaps, could be made more quickly responsive to the public will, but that is merely a temporal detail; it is responsive enough for all practical purposes. Any conceivable change in the laws could be effected without tampering with the fundamental scheme. The fact, no doubt, largely explains the hostility of the inferior American to the thing called direct action—the darling of his equals in most other countries. He is against it, not merely because he is a coward and distrusts liberty, but also, and maybe mainly, because he believes that revolution, in the United States, is unnecessary—that any reform advocated by a respectable majority, or even by a determined minority, may be achieved peacefully and by constitutional means. In this belief he is right. The American people, keeping strictly within the Constitution, could do anything that the most soaring fancy suggested. They could, by a simple amendment of that hoary scripture,