And yet we cannot permit the pressures of party responsibility to submerge on every issue the call of personal responsibility. For the party which, in its drive for unity, discipline and success, ever decides to exclude new ideas, independent conduct or insurgent members, is in danger. In the words of Senator Albert Beveridge:

               A party can live only by growing, intolerance of ideas (brings its) death….An organization that depends upon reproduction only for its votes, son taking the place of the father, is not a political party, but a Chinese tong ; not citizens brought together by thought and conscience, but an Indian tribe held together by blood and prejudice.

The two-party system remains not because both are rigid but because both are flexible. The Republican party when I entered Congress was big enough to hold, for example, both Robert Taft and Wayne Morse- and the Democratic side of the Senate in which I now serve can happily embrace, for example, both Harry Byrd and Wayne Morse.

Of Course, both major parties today seek to serve the national interest. They would do so in order to obtain the broadest base of support, if for no nobler reason. But when party and officeholder differ as to how the national interest is to be served, we must place first the responsibility we owe not to our party or even to our constituents but to our individual consciences.

But it is a little easier to dismiss one’s obligations to local interests and party ties than to face quarely the problem of one’s responsibility to the will of his constituents. A Senator who avoids this responsibility would appear to be accountable to no one, and the basis safeguards of our democratic system would thus have vanished. He is no longuer representative in the true sense, he has violated his public trust, he has betrayed the confidence demonstrated by those who voted for him to carry out their views.”Is the creature,”as John Tyler asked the House of Representatives in his maiden speech,”to set himself in opposition to his Creator ? Is the servant to disobey the wishes of his master ?”

                      How can he be regarded as representing the people when he speaks, not their    language, but his own ? He ceases to be their representative when he does so, and represent himself alone.

In short, according to this school of thought, if I am so be properly responsive to the will of my constituents, it is my duty to place their principles, not mine, above all else. This may not always be easy, but it nevertheless is the essence of democracy, faith in the wisdom of the people and their views. To be sure, the people will make mistakes-they will get no better government than they deserve-but that is far better than the representative of the people arrogating for himself the right to say he knows better than they what is good for them. Is he not chosen, the argument closes, to vote as they would vote were they in his place ?

It is difficult to accept such a narrow view of the role of United States Senator-a view thaht assumes the people of Massachusetts sent me to Washington to serve merely as a seismograph to records shifts in popular opinion. I reject this view not because  I lack faith in the “wisdom of the people”, but because this concept of democracy actually puts too little faith in the people. Those who would deny the obligation of the representative to be bound by every impulse of the electorate-regardless of the conclusions his own deliberations direct-do trust in the wisdom of the people. They have faith in their ultimate sense of justice, faith in their ability to honor courage and respect judgment, and faith that in the long run they will act unselfishly for the good of the nation. It is that kind of faith on which democracy is based, not simply the often frustrated hope that public opinion will at all times under all circumstances promptly identify itself with the public interest.

The voters selected us, in short, because they had confidence in our judgment and our ability to exercise that judgment from a position where we could determine what were their own best interests, as a part of the Nation’s interests. This may mean that we must on occasion lead, inform, correct and sometimes even ignore constituents opinion, if we are to exercise fully thaht judgment for which we were elected. But acting without selfish motive or private bias, those who follow the dictates of an intelligent conscience are not aristocrats, demagogues, eccentrics or callous politicians insensitive to the feelings of the public. They expect-and not without considerable trepidation-their constituents to be the final judges of the wisdom of their course; but they have faith that those constituents-today, tomorrow or even in another generation-will at least respect the principles that motivated their independent stand.

If their careers are temporarily or even permanently buried under an avalanche of abusive editorials, poison-pen letters, and opposition votes at the polls-as they sometimes are, for that is the risk they take- they await the future with hope and confidence, aware of the fact that the voting public frequently suffers from what ex-Congressman T.V. Smith called the lag ”between our way of thought and our way of life.”Smith compared it to the subject of the anonymous poem:

                  There was a dachshunde once,

                  He hadn’t any notion

                  How long it took to notify

                  His tail of his emotion;

                  And so it happened, while his eyes

                  Were filled with woe and sadness,

                  His little tail went wagging on

                  Because of previous gladness.

Moreover, I question whether any Senator, before we vote on a measure, can state with certainty exactly how the majority of his constituents feel on the issue as it is presented to the senate. Alla of us in the Senate live in an iron lung-the iron lung of politics, and it is no easy task to emerge from thaht rarefied atmosphere in order to breathe the same fresh air our constituents breathe. It is to difficult, too, to see in person an appreciate number of voters besides those professional hangers-on and vocal elements who gather about the politician on a trip home. In Washington I frequently find myself believing thaht forty of fifty letters, six visits from professional politicians and lobbyists, and there editorials in Massachusetts newspapers constitute public opinion on a given issue. Yet in truth I rarely know how the great majority of the voters feel, or even how much they know of the issues thaht seem so burning in Washington.