Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PARTY ISSUES Citizens differ in opinion as to what is best for the State. This fact is fundamental in the formation of political parties. There are shades of opinion corresponding to each independent observer and thinker. The dividing of many millions of persons into two parties does not enable the individual to see his own views prevail, but it does enable the great body of the citizens to exercise a more or less effective choice as to certain prevailing tendencies which may be deemed, at the time, of primary importance. No individual gets his will, but all in each party may have a modifying influence over the result. The bases for differences are innumerable. Some are subjective, some are objective. Some men are controlled by what goes on in their own minds: they live a predominantly subjective life. They are the poets, the dreamers, the enthusiasts, the prophets, and the fanatics. Others live an objective life. They are slow to believe in the reality of anything which they do not touch, and taste, and handle. The dreamers and the materialists do not understand each other. Extreme types in these diverse classesare utterly incapable of reaching a basis of agreement or of mutual understanding. This difference in the human type is never consciously a cause of party division, and it is well that this is so. A state divided into two hostile parties, the conduct of one partly controlled by experiences drawn from the inner consciousness of its members, and the conduct of the other guided wholly by external appearances, would be an intolerable bedlam. Long before that condition of society is reached in which the democratic State becomes possible or even thinkable, a large body of citizens have been trained to habits of recognizing distinct and characteristic virt... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.