There comes a time in the history of every nation, when its independence of spirit vanishes, unless it emancipates itself in some measure from its traditional illusions; and that time is fast approaching for the American people.
They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely the monotonous measures of its own past.
III THE PEOPLE AND THE NATION At the beginning of this discussion popular Sovereignty was declared to be the essential condition of democracy; and a general account of the nature of a constructive democratic ideal can best be brought to a close by a definition of the meaning of the phrase, popular Sovereignty, consistent with a nationalist interpretation of democracy.

The people are Sovereign; but who and what are the people?
and how can a many-headed Sovereignty be made to work?
Are we to answer, like Bismarck, that the "true people is an invisible multitude of spirits--the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow"?
Such an answer seems scarcely fair to living people of to-day.

On the other hand, can we reply that the Sovereign people is constituted by any chance majority which happens to obtain control of the government, and that the decisions and actions of the majority are inevitably and unexceptionally democratic?
Such an assertion of the doctrine of popular Sovereignty would bestow absolute Sovereign authority on merely a part of the people.

Majority rule, under certain prescribed conditions, is a necessary constituent of any practicable democratic organization; but the actions or decisions of a majority need not have any binding moral and national authority.

Majority rule is merely one means to an extremely difficult, remote and complicated end; and it is a piece of machinery which is peculiarly liable to get out of order.