It implies a conception of democracy and its purpose very different from the Jeffersonian doctrine of equal rights.

Evidences of deep antagonism can be discerned between the Hamiltonian method and spirit, represented by Mr.Roosevelt, and a conception of democracy which makes it consist fundamentally in the practical realization of any system of equal rights.

The distrust with which thorough-going Jeffersonians regard Mr.
Roosevelt's nationalizing programme is a justifiable distrust, because efficient and responsible national organization would be dangerous either to or in the sort of democracy which the doctrine of equal rights encourages--a democracy of suspicious discontent, of selfish claims, of factious agitation, and of individual and class aggression.

A thoroughly responsible and efficient national organization would be dangerous in such a democracy, because it might well be captured by some combination of local individual or class interests; and the only effective way to guard against such a danger is to substitute for the Jeffersonian democracy of individual rights a democracy of individual and social improvement.

A democracy of individual rights, that is, must either suffer reconstruction by the logic of a process of efficient national organization, or else it may pervert that organization to the service of its own ambiguous, contradictory, and in the end subversive political purposes.