s with his tools. But to say that we must make
tools first, and then begin, is to invert the process of life. Men did
not agree to refrain from travel until a railroad was built. To make the
manufacture of instruments an ideal is to lose much of their ideal value.
A nation bent upon a policy of social invention would make its tools an
incident. But just this perception is lacking in many propagandists. That
is why their issues are so sterile; that is why the absorption in "next
steps" is a diversion from statesmanship.

The narrowness of American political issues is a fixation upon
instruments. Tradition has centered upon the tariff, the trusts, the
currency, and electoral machinery as the items of consideration. It is
the failure to go behind them--to see them as the pale servants of a
vivid social life--that keeps our politics in bondage to a few problems.
It is a common experience repeated in you and me. Once our profession
becomes all absorbing it hardens into pedantry. "A human being," says
Wells, "who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first
place, or a statesman in the first place is thereby and inevitably,
though he bring God-like gifts to the pretense--a quack."

Reformers particularly resent the enlargement of political issues. I have
heard socialists denounce other socialists for occupying themselves with
the problems of sex. The claim was that these questions should be put
aside so as not to disturb the immediate program. The socialists knew
from experience that sex views cut across economic ones--that a new
interest breaks up the alignment. Woodrow Wilson expressed this same fear
in his views on the liquor question: after declaring for local option he
went on to say that "the questions involved are social and moral and are
not susceptible of being made part of a party program. Whenever they have
been made the subject matter of party contests they have cut the lines of
party organization and party action athwart, to the utter confusion of
political action in every other field.... I do not believe party programs
of the highest consequence to the political life of the State and of the
nation ought to be thrust on one side and hopelessly embarrassed for long
periods together by making a political issue of a great question which is
essentially non-political, non-partisan, moral and social in its nature."

That statement was issued at the beginning of a campaign in which Woodrow
Wilson was the