We haven't executive domination and we haven't anything in its place. We voted to go back to the nineties, but we haven't got there. There is no Mark Hanna speaking for business and for party to make the system work. We have the willessness of the blessed days in our National Heartbreak House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to act and direct. Not even seven million majority is enough to bring back the past. In spite of "landslides" the course is always forward, and I use "forward" not in the necessarily optimistic sense of those who were once so sure of Progress. The initiative, so far as there is any, has passed to Congress. And so far as I can see, it is likely to remain with Congress, until some new turn of events brings us back the strong executive. For, after all, Congress chose Mr. Harding. The Senators picked him at Chicago. With party bosses gone, they are about all that remains of the party, and there is no reason why they should not go on naming Presidents. And the power of presidents will not rise much above its source. The autocratic President goes inevitably the way its prototype the autocrat went. The loins that produce them are sufficiently fertile. Primogeniture brought forth feeble kings. The nominating system called on for a great man every four years yields many feeble ones. There will be many Hardings to one Roosevelt or Wilson. Party government which might reinforce a feeble president is weak. Government by business has lost its confidence and authority. The great discovery of the first decade of this century for making this government of ours work is already in the discard. So at a critical moment when government by Progress and government by business have broken down, government by one man at Washington has also gone. The war made the autocratic executive in the person of Mr. Wilson intolerable. It also destroyed the basis for national concentration upon the executive. We need a new picture in our heads of what government should be, what its limits should be when it faces such vital problems as interfering with God's time, and where its authority should center. We have none. CHAPTER V LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM--IN THE BOSOM OF THERESE We now pursue further the search for authority. We shall surely find "divine right" somewhere, now that business has lost it. Someone certainly has the final word about the pictures to put in our heads. Ah! there is the public, the imputation of a miraculous quality to whose opinion has a curious history. Everybody agrees that we owe most of the pleasant illusions upon which this democracy of ours is based to Rousseau. This Swiss sentimentalist about humanity, whose ideas have so profoundly affected the history of the last century and a half, was a convinced believer that perfect good sense resided in the bosom of the natural man, the man "born free and equal" of our Declaration of Independence.