individuals not executively concerned in a specific disorder may have public opinions and may intervene as a public. FOOTNOTES: [27] John Maynard Keynes, _A Revision of the Treaty_, p. 4. [28] In a letter to William Wirt, cited by John Sharp Williams, _Thomas Jefferson_, p. 7. [29] Harold J. Laski, _Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty_, p. 24. [30] Kenneth Macgowan, _The Theatre of Tomorrow_, pp. 249–50. Chapter XV ABSENTEE RULERS 1 The practical effect of the monistic theories of society has been to rationalize that vast concentrating of political and economic power in the midst of which we live. Since society was supposed to have organic purposes of its own, it came to seem quite reasonable that these purposes should be made manifest to a people by laws and decisions from a central point. Somebody had to have a purpose revealed to him which could be treated as the common purpose; if it was to be accepted it had to be enforced by command; if it was really to look like the national purpose, it had to be handed down as a rule binding upon all. Thus men could say with Goethe: “And then a mighty work completed stands, One mind suffices for a thousand hands.”[31] In this fashion the eulogies of the Great Society have been made. Two thousand years ago it was possible for whole civilizations as mature as the Chinese and the Greco-Roman to coexist in total indifference to one another. Today the food supplies, the raw materials, the manufactures, the communications and the peace of the world constitute one great system which cannot be thrown severely out of balance in any part without disturbing the whole. Looked at from the top, the system in its far-flung and intricate adjustments has a certain grandeur. It might, as some hopeful persons think, even ultimately mean the brotherhood of man since all men living in advanced communities are now in quite obvious fashion dependent upon one another. But the individual man cannot look at the system steadily from the top or see it in its ultimate speculative possibilities. For him it means in practice, along with the rise in certain of his material standards of life, a nerve-wracking increase of the incalculable forces that bear upon his fate. My neighbor in the country who borrowed money to raise potatoes which he cannot sell for cash looks at the bills from the village store asking for immediate cash payments, and does not share the philosophic hopeful view of the interdependence of the world. When unseen commission merchants in New York City refuse his potatoes, the calamity is as dumfounding as a drought or a plague of locusts.