We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy. Party or “interests” govern us with some fiction of the “consent of the governed” which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life. We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of the individual. Our particularism—our _laissez-faire_, our every-man-for-his-own-interests—has little to do with true individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes his all. Politics do not need to be “purified.” This thought is leading us astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. “Representative government,” party organization, majority rule, with all their excrescences, are dead-wood. In their stead must appear the organization of non-partisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of common ideas, a common purpose and a collective will. Government by the people must be more than the phrase. We are told—The people should do this, the people should do that, the people must be given control of foreign policy, etc. etc. But all this is wholly useless unless we provide the procedure within which the people _can_ do this or that. What does the “sovereign will” of the people amount to unless it has some way of operating? Or have we any “sovereign will?” There is little yet that is practical in “practical politics.” But method must not connote mechanics to any mind. Many of us are more interested in the mechanism of life than in anything else. We keep on putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in seeing something come out at the other end. All this must change. Machines, forms, images, moulds—all must be broken up and the way prepared for our plastic life to find plastic expression. The principle of democracy may be the underlying unity of men, the method of democracy must be that which allows the quickest response of our daily life to the common faith of men. Are we capable of a new method? Can the inventive faculty of the American people be extended from mechanical things to political organization? There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in our history. Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments which will largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise enough to make the necessary political and social adjustments—that is the crucial question which faces America to-day. Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes. Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose.