was not concerned fundamentally with harmonizing the essential interest of the individual with the essential popular or social interest.  Jefferson’s political system was intended for the benefit only of a special class of individuals, viz., those average people who would not be helped by any really formative rule or method of discrimination.  In practice it has proved to be inimical to individual liberty, efficiency, and distinction.  An insistent demand for equality, even in the form of a demand for equal rights, inevitably has a negative and limiting effect upon the free and able exercise of individual opportunities.  From the Jeffersonian point of view democracy would incur a graver danger from a violation of equality than it would profit from a triumphant assertion of individual liberty.  Every opportunity for the edifying exercise of power, on the part either of an individual, a group of individuals, or the state is by its very nature also an opportunity for its evil exercise.  The political leader whose official power depends upon popular confidence may betray the trust.  The corporation employing thousands of men and supplying millions of people with some necessary service or commodity may reduce the cost of production only for its own profit.  The state may use its great authority chiefly for the benefit of special interests.  The advocate of equal rights is preoccupied by these opportunities for the abusive exercise of power, because from his point of view rights exercised in the interest of inequality have ceased to be righteous.  He distrusts those forms of individual and associated activity which give any individual or association substantial advantages over their associates.  He becomes suspicious of any kind of individual and social distinction with the nature and effects of which he is not completely familiar.

A democracy of equal rights may tend to encourage certain expressions of individual liberty; but they are few in number and limited in scope.  It rejoices in the freedom of its citizens, provided this freedom receives certain ordinary expressions.  It will follow a political leader, like Jefferson or Jackson, with a blind confidence of which a really free democracy would not be capable, because such leaders are, or claim to be in every respect, except their prominence, one of the “people.”  Distinction of this kind does not separate a leader from the majority.  It only ties them together more firmly.  It is an acceptable assertion of individual liberty, because it is liberty converted by its exercise into a kind of equality.  In the same way the American democracy most cordially admired for a long time men, who pursued more energetically and successfully than their fellows, ordinary business occupations, because they believed that such familiar expressions of individual liberty really tended towards social and industrial homogeneity.  Herein they were mistaken; but the supposition was made in good faith, and it constitutes the basis of the Jeffersonian Democrat’s illusion in reference to his own interest in liberty.  He dislikes or ignores liberty, only when it looks in the direction of moral and intellectual emancipation.  In so far as his influence has prevailed, Americans have been encouraged to think those thoughts and to perform those acts which everybody else is thinking and performing.