So it came about that when we determined to have a government at Washington independent of and better representing the social will, whatever that might come to be, than the government of business we had recourse to that one form of rule which is ever present in our consciousness, the only form under which the race has lived long enough to have any real faith in it. The new social ideal had not sufficiently taken form to utilize all the complex institutions which existed in this country. Business was at that time intrenched in Congress. It would have been a huge, an impossible task, to re-make Congress, especially when no one knew definitely what purpose should animate the re-making. It was so much easier to find one man than to find many men. It is so much easier for a people which does not know where it is going but means to go there to choose one man, and by an act of faith endow him with the divination of leadership, than it is to have a national will and express it through numerous representatives. The amplified executive is a sort of blind pool of the national purposes. Creating an autocracy is an act of faith; democracy is work. And faith is so much easier than work. We did not think of it thus, as an exhibition of political inertia, as a reversion to an outworn type. On the contrary, we were immensely pleased with our innovation. As usual the United States had made an immense contribution to the art of government. We were repeating the race history of governments, as a child resumes in his life the race history of the human kind. We had got so far as to evolve that oldest of human institutions--autocracy, a mild, denatured autocracy. But we were as proud of it as a boy is when he put on paper with a pencil the very picture which his stone age ancestor cut laboriously into a walrus tooth. Our President had more power than the King of England, we boasted, more than the Emperor of Germany. The monarchies of Europe were obsolete because they preserved autocracy out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. Our government was in the forefront of progress because it had created autocracy out of the suffrage of the people. And how clever we were with the restrictions of our written constitution with its exact balance of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial. The Fathers had builded wiser than they knew in writing an instrument by which the carefully distributed authority might be well reconcentrated; as if they were the first to use words whose import depended on the point of view of those who interpreted them! Acres of space in the newspapers were covered with gratulatory articles proving that the dominating executive was the inevitable unifying principle in our disjointed and not otherwise workable government.