The grossest form of this error was perpetrated when Stephen A.Douglas confused authoritative popular Sovereignty with the majority vote of a few hundred "squatters" in a frontier state, and asserted that on democratic principles such expressions of the popular will should be accepted as final.

But an analogous mistake lurks in all static forms of democracy.
The bestowal and the exercise of political and civil rights are merely a method of organization, which if used in proper subordination to the ultimate democratic purpose, may achieve in action something of the authority of a popular Sovereign will.

But to cleave to the details of such an organization as the very essence of democracy is utterly to pervert the principle of national democratic Sovereignty.

From this point of view, the Bourbon who wishes the existing system with its mal-adaptations and contradictions preserved in all its lack of integrity, commits an error analogous to that of the radical, who wishes by virtue of a majority vote immediately to destroy some essential part of the fabric.

Both of them conceive that the whole moral and national authority of the democratic principle can be invoked in favor of institutions already in existence or of purposes capable of immediate achievement.
On the other hand, there are democrats who would seek a consummate democracy without the use of any political machinery.