And yet we should do the subject less than justice were we not to recall an historical adventure that befell the county in the period of its coming of age, when it was assuming something like its typical American form. It was about the time of the Revolution when the atmosphere was particularly uncomfortable for “tyrants” and for every created thing that could be given the semblance of “tyranny.” “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over those States.” So ran the Declaration of Independence, and if it was not a precise statement of fact, it was at least an accurate gauge of the fighting public opinion that was making political institutions. King George’s “frightfulness” seems to have been chiefly and most concretely brought into the public eye in the colonies by the acts of “swarms of officers” that had been sent over “to harass our people and eat out their substance.” From the point of view of the British Empire, it was a stiffening up of the colonial administration to make effective the Navigation Acts, the Stamp Acts, and similar measures. But it had come too late. Through a century and a half the spirit of independence had grown firmer and firmer and the colonists’ sense of identity with the British Empire had sensibly diminished. So that when the imperial revenue collectors began to “swarm” on their shores, the colonists were goaded into a smashing antimonarchical mood. It was no mere temporary fit of rage, and when physical violence of the Revolution was over, the intellectual upheaval steadily gathered new force through the influence of men of the Jefferson school. One of the feats to which the statesmen of the Revolution devoted themselves was devising means for preventing future “swarms” and the “tyranny” they brought with them. What irritated them more than all else was the fact that these imperial agents were not colonially selected and controlled. But now the people had replaced the king. _They_ would now select the officers. A happy thought! But how to work it out; that was the question. It is easy enough to pick flaws in their handicraft, but it should be borne in mind that the architects of the nineteenth century American democracy were working in the dark without models or precedents and without established principles of organization. It is easy now to look back and say: “You carried your ‘democracy’ too far. It would have been not only enough, but infinitely more effective to have let the people select simply the legislative or ‘policy-determining’ officers and subordinated the administration to them. The thing to do was to control the _source_ of power. If you had been careful to separate ‘politics’ from ‘administration’ you would have saved our generation a whole world of political woe.”