The essential point is that as the machine technology makes social relations complex, it dissolves the habits of obedience and dependence; it disintegrates the centralization [p275] of power and of leadership; it diffuses the experience of responsible decision throughout the population, compelling each man to acquire the habit of making judgments instead of looking for orders, of adjusting his will to the wills of others instead of trusting to custom and organic loyalties. The real law under which modern society is administered is neither the accumulated precedents of tradition nor a set of commands originating on high which are imposed like orders in an army upon the rank and file below. The real law in the modern state is the multitude of little decisions made daily by millions of men. Because this is so, the character of government is changing radically. This change is obscured for us in our theorizing by the fact that our political ideas derive from a different kind of social experience. We think of governing as the act of a person; for the actual king we have tried to substitute a corporate king, which we call the nation, the people, the majority, public opinion, or the general will. But none of these entities has the attributes of a king, and the failure of political thinking to lay the ghosts of monarchy leads to endless misunderstanding. The crucial difference between modern politics and that to which mankind has been accustomed is that the power to act and to compel obedience is almost never sufficiently centralized nowadays to be exercised by one will. The power is distributed and qualified so that power is exerted not by command but by interaction. The prime business of government, therefore, is not to direct the affairs of the community, but to harmonize the direction which the community gives to its affairs. [p276] The Congress of the United States, for example, does not consult the conscience and its God and then decree a tariff law. It enacts the kind of tariff which at the moment represents the most stable compromise among the interests which have made themselves heard. The law may be outrageously unfair. But if it is, that is because those whose interests are neglected did not at that time have the power to make themselves felt. If the law favors manufacturers rather than farmers, it is because the manufacturers at that time have greater weight in the social equilibrium than the farmers. That may sound hard. But it is doubtful whether a modern legislature can make laws effective if those laws are not the formal expression of what the persons actually affected can and wish to do.