“The unhappy conflict in political thinking between representative government and direct democracy, which has been so much a feature of recent political discussion in the United States, is due more than anything else, I think, to a misunderstanding of what democracy means. A genuine democracy is not a mass-meeting, a mob, or a wildcat system of direct nominations. A genuine and efficient democracy must have two elements: responsible and representative leadership and the final lodgment of control over that leadership in the instinct, the common sense, and the conscience of the whole people. When this country was young and the Nation was forming after the Revolution, there was great confidence in leadership, and very little confidence in the good sense of the mass of the people. There were reasons for this which grew out of certain distressing experiences during the critical period of American history which immediately preceded the making of the Constitution in 1789. The Constitutional Convention itself had for a chief object the curbing of what was again and again described in the debates as "the turbulence and follies of democracy."”
