The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the democratic ideal. For a long time, too--until he had come to know more of the actual business of democracy--he had never questioned democratic practice. He was young and innocent.
But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him--or his hopeful heart had not let him understand--that men had to struggle against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.
His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in democracy--quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never imagined. Surely, the love of money _was_ the root of all evil--or of nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement and potentiality--yes, and whose freedom--he and his schoolfellows had written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought. War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.