Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government, that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease threatens even the most healthy. Government, at first organized for conquest and subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of experience. But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the essence infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chopped off, a whole class is guillotined, reform movements come and go, the masters fight every inch of their retreat, and pile stratagem upon stratagem, device upon device, to retain their spoils. The democratic formula of freedom for all comes to the fore. So at last universal suffrage is introduced as the panacea. Freedom seems within grasp. Now it looks as if a method and an objective have been hit upon, that will lead both the free and the enslaved out of their mutual bondage, and release the handcuffs which have bound them together. All the trial and error tests to which history had subjected institutions appeared to culminate in the formula that would automatically yield Liberty. The French wanted a little more and added Equality and Fraternity. The Americans put it quite definitely as the formula that would assist the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness. That formula is: the _democracy of the normals_. To be sure, a civilization might be organized for the breeding and the glorification of the supernormals. Such a civilization may yet have to be tried. But as the supernormals, as we know them today, are merely biologic sports, in a sense, simple accidents, no one can tell whether they will turn out true shots or just flashes in the pan. So it looks the better course to stick to the plan of nature, which seems to be the raising of the level of the normals, and the gradual increase of their faculties and powers. WHAT THE STATESMAN IS UP AGAINST Under the terms of the democratic formula the problems of the statesman seem to become enormously simplified. That is, if one assumes that he has worked out a perfectly clear idea of what a democracy means and what the normal means. Assuming these unassumables, his problem simplifies into the definite object of producing and developing the greatest possible number of normals--or if you will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of normal lives.