Yet Bryce is authority for the statement that “the will of the sovereign people is expressed ... in the United States ... by as large a proportion of the registered voters as in any other country.”[5] And certainly Mr. Lowell’s tables on the use of the initiative and referendum in Switzerland in the main support the view that the indifference of the American voter is not unique.[6] In fact, realistic political thinkers in Europe long ago abandoned the notion that the collective mass of the people direct the course of public affairs. Robert Michels, himself a Socialist, says flatly that “the majority is permanently incapable of self-government,”[7] and quotes approvingly the remark of a Swedish Socialist Deputy, Gustaf F. Steffen, that “even after the victory there will always remain in political life the leaders and the led.” Michels, who is a political thinker of great penetration, unburdens himself finally on the subject by printing a remark of Hertzen’s that the victory of an opposition party amounts to “passing from the sphere of envy to the sphere of avarice.” There is then nothing particularly new in the disenchantment which the private citizen expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for the head of the ticket, by staying away from the primaries, by not reading speeches and documents, by the whole list of sins of omission for which he is denounced. I shall not denounce him further. My sympathies are with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen. FOOTNOTES: [1] Cited Philip Guedalla, _The Second Empire_. [2] Logan Pearsall Smith, _More Trivia_, p. 41. [3] _Cf._ Simon Michelet, _Stay-at-Home Vote and Absentee Voters_, pamphlet of the National Get Out the Vote Club; also A. M. Schlesinger and E. M. Erickson, “The Vanishing Voter,” _New Republic_, Oct. 15, 1924. The percentage of the popular to the eligible vote from 1865 to 1920 declined from 83.51 per cent to 52.36 per cent. [4] Charles Edward Merriam and Harvey Foote Gosnell, _Non-Voting: Causes and Methods of Control_. [5] James Bryce, _Modern Democracies_, Vol. II, p. 52. [6] A. Lawrence Lowell, _Public Opinion and Popular Government_. _Cf._ Appendices. [7] Robert Michels, _Political Parties_, p. 390. Chapter II THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL