psychological stratum in which the normal balance of faculty and
sentiment is overthrown.

When a statesman, who is not wholly unworthy of that great name, finds
an abstract principle in his way, as, for instance, that of popular
sovereignty, he accepts it, if he accepts it at all, according to his
conception of its practical bearings. He begins, accordingly, by
imagining it applied and in operation. From personal recollections and
such information as he can obtain, he forms an idea of some village or
town, some community of moderate size in the north, in the south, or
in the center of the country, for which he has to make laws. He then
imagines its inhabitants acting according to his principle, that is to
say, voting, mounting guard, levying taxes, and administering their
own affairs. Familiar with ten or a dozen groups of this sort, which
he regards as examples, he concludes by analogy as to others and the
rest on the territory. Evidently it is a difficult and uncertain
process; to be exact, or nearly so, requires rare powers of
observation and, at each step, a great deal of tact, for a nice
calculation has to be made on given quantities imperfectly ascertained
and imperfectly noted![15] Any political leader who does this
successfully, does it through the ripest experience associated with
genius. And even then he keeps his hand on the check-rein in pushing
his innovation or reform; he is almost always tentative; he applies
his law only in part, gradually and provisionally; he wishes to
ascertain its effect; he is always ready to stay its operation, amend
it, or modify it, according to the good or ill results of experiment;
the state of the human material he has to deal with is never clear to
his mind, even when superior, until after many and repeated gropings.
-- Now the Jacobin pursues just the opposite course. His principle is
an axiom of political geometry, which always carries its own proof