a Political Factor 67 



of the upper or of the lower class, is not a govern 

 ment of the whole people, but a government of part 

 of the people at the expense of the rest. Where the 

 lines of political division are vertical, the men of 

 each occupation and of every social standing sepa 

 rating according to their vocations and principles, 

 the result is healthy and normal. Just so far, how 

 ever, as the lines are drawn horizontally, the result 

 is unhealthy, and in the long run disastrous, for 

 such a division means that men are pitted against 

 one another in accordance with the blind and selfish 

 interests of the moment. Each is thus placed over 

 against his neighbor in an attitude of greedy class 

 hostility, which becomes the mainspring of his con 

 duct, instead of each basing his political action upon 

 his own convictions as to what is advisable and what 

 inadvisable, and upon his own disinterested sense of 

 devotion to the interests of the whole community as 

 he sees them. Republics have fallen in the past 

 primarily because the parties that controlled them 

 divided along the lines of class, so that inevitably 

 the triumph of one or the other implied the su 

 premacy of a part over the whole. The result might 

 be an oligarchy, or it might be mob rule ; it mattered 

 little which, as regards the ultimate effect, for in 

 both cases tyranny and anarchy were sure to alter 

 nate. The failure of the Greek and Italian republics 

 was fundamentally due to this cause. Switzerland 



