esires themselves are no less
real and insistent.

The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform
but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The
meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a
party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good
socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness
of vision.

The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of
one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should
not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to
make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to
deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a
disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely
partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and
the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it
is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other.

The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward
to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into
the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft
committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and
women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their
discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power.
Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the
social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For
this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of
understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a
civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need
not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It
is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a
professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty
formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius
stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their