The less independent and efficient the several departments of the government are permitted to become, the less likely that the government as a whole will use its power for anything but a really popular purpose.
In the foregoing type of political organization, which has been very much favored by the American democracy, the freedom of the official political leader is sacrificed for the benefit of the supposed freedom of that class of equalized individuals known as the "people," but by the "people" Jefferson and his followers have never meant all the people or the people as a whole.

They have meant a sort of apotheosized majority--the people in so far as they could be generalized and reduced to an average.

The interests of this class were conceived as inimical to any discrimination which tended to select peculiarly efficient individuals or those who were peculiarly capable of social service.

The system of equal rights, particularly in its economic and political application _has_ worked for the benefit of such a class, but rather in its effect upon American intelligence and morals, than in its effect upon American political and economic development.

The system, that is, has only partly served the purpose of its founder and his followers, and it has failed because it did not bring with it any machinery adequate even to its own insipid and barren purposes.