For in almost every political theory there is an inscrutable element
which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined. Behind the
appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates
to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a
Class of the Better Born. The more obvious angels, demons, and kings
are gone out of democratic thinking, but the need for believing that
there are reserve powers of guidance persists. It persisted for those
thinkers of the Eighteenth Century who designed the matrix of
democracy. They had a pale god, but warm hearts, and in the doctrine
of popular sovereignty they found the answer to their need of an
infallible origin for the new social order. There was the mystery, and
only enemies of the people touched it with profane and curious hands.
2
They did not remove the veil because they were practical politicians
in a bitter and uncertain struggle. They had themselves felt the
aspiration of democracy, which is ever so much deeper, more intimate
and more important than any theory of government. They were engaged,
as against the prejudice of ages, in the assertion of human dignity.
What possessed them was not whether John Smith had sound views on any
public question, but that John Smith, scion of a stock that had always
been considered inferior, would now bend his knee to no other man. It
was this spectacle that made it bliss "in that dawn to be alive.
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