24
The Economics of Freedom
we have pinned our faith to democracy and this is our ample channel for advantageous effort, if we can clear it of old obstructions. We have nothing to fear save our capacity for self-delusion, which is largely due to the inbred degradations of autocracy, and our prompt adulteration of democracy with schemes for individual vantage and power, the seeds of which are brought in with every immigrant who does not realize that democracy rests, not upon some miraculous domination of cause and effect, or some advantageous domination of the effort of others, but upon that most reasonable yet difficult domination of all—the domination of self; for no latter-day miracle is going to make the whole any greater than the sum of its parts.
