True democrats will be very jealous of government. Necessary as it is, there is no magic about government, no saving grace. Government cannot redeem us from our sins; it will always require all the decency we possess to redeem the government. Government always represents the moral dilemmas of the worst people, not the best. It cannot give us freedom; it can give or grant us nothing but what it first takes from us. It is we who grant to the government certain powers and privileges necessary for its proper functioning. We do not exist for the government; it exists for us. We are not its servants; it is our servant. Government at best is a useful and necessary machine, a mechanism by which we protect ourselves from one another. It has no more rights and dignities of its own than are possessed by any other machine. Its laws should be obeyed, for the same reason that the laws of mechanics should be obeyed--otherwise the machine will not run. As a matter of fact it is not so much government itself against which the democrat must be on guard, but the various crowds which are always seeking to make use of the machinery of government in order to impose their peculiar tyranny upon all and invade the privacy of everyone. By widening the radius of governmental control, the crowd thus pinches down the individuality of everyone with the same restrictions as are imposed by the crowd upon its own members. Conway says: Present-day Democracy rests on a few organized parties. What would a democracy be like if based on millions of independent Joneses each of whom decided to vote this or that way as he pleased? The dominion of the crowd would be at an end, both for better and for worse. We shall not behold any such revolution in the world as we know it.... Thus we must conclude that the crowd by its very nature tends, and always must tend, to diminish (if possible, to the vanishing point) the freedom of its members, and not in one or two respects alone, but in all. The crowd's desire is to swallow up the individuality of its members and reduce them one and all to the condition of crowd units whose whole life is lived according to the crowd-pattern and is sacrificed and devoted to crowd-interests....