n pretty thoroughly. In serious
matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth essential of a valuable
contribution--_that which will square with the public conscience of the
American people_.

I do not care to dilate upon the exploded pretensions of Mr. and Mrs.
Grundy. They are a fairly disreputable couple by this time because we are
beginning to know how much morbidity they represent. The Vice Commission,
for example, bowed to what might be called the "instinctive conscience"
of America when it balked at tracing vice to its source in the
over-respected institutions of American life and the over-respected
natures of American men and women. It bowed to the prevailing conscience
when it proposed taboos instead of radical changes. It bowed to a
traditional conscience when it confused the sins of sex with the
possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to a verbal conscience, to a
lip morality, when, with extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it
proclaimed "absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal. In brief, the
commission failed to see that the working conscience of America is to-day
bound up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by a relentless
warfare.

It was to be expected. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal
verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means
a radical change in conscience. In order to do away with vice America
must live and think and feel differently. This is an old story. Because
of it all innovators have been at war with the public conscience of their
time. Yet there is nothing strange or particularly disheartening about
this commonplace observation: to expect anything else is to hope that a
nation will lift itself by its own bootstraps. Yet there is danger the
moment leaders of the people make a virtue of homage to the unregenerate,
public conscience.

In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912) there is a leading article
called "The Great Issue." You can read there that "the composite judgment
is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the
judgment of any one individual mind. The people have been betrayed by
their representatives again and again. The real danger to democracy lies
not in the ignorance or want of patriotism of the people, but in the
corrupting influence of powerful business organizations upon the
representatives of the people...."

I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its negativity. With the
belief that g