The national principle becomes a principle of reform and reconstruction, precisely because national consistency is constantly demanding the solution of contradictory economic and political tendencies, brought out by alterations in the conditions of economic and political efficiency.

Its function is not only to preserve a balance among these diverse tendencies, but to make that balance more than ever expressive of a consistent and constructive democratic ideal.
Any disloyalty to democracy on the part of American national policy would in the end prove fatal to American national unity.
The American democracy can, consequently, safely trust its genuine interests to the keeping of those who represent the national interest.
It both can do so, and it must do so.

Only by faith in an efficient national organization and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good.

If the American local commonwealths had not been wrought by the Federalists into the form of a nation, they would never have continued to be democracies; and the people collectively have become more of a democracy in proportion as they have become more of a nation.

Their democracy is to be realized by means of an intensification of their national life, just as the ultimate moral purpose of an individual is to be realized by the affirmation and intensification of its own better individuality.
Consequently the organization of the American democracy into a nation is not to be regarded in the way that so many Americans have regarded it,--as a necessary but hazardous surrender of certain liberties in order that other liberties might be better preserved,--as a mere compromise between the democratic ideal and the necessary conditions of political cohesion and efficiency.