ts in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and
endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in
the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting
viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own
overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class
war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and
their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a
struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted
men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a
civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the
powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter.
The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan,
Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of
to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.

It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke more wisely or as a better
friend of civilization than the time when he said at New York City on
March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France for a century and a quarter have
been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of
unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had
pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up
all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon
reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot;
and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They
gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of
the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled
extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with
convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations
of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went
through misery to a shattered goal."

Profound changes are not only necessary, but highly desirable. Even if
this country were comfortably well-off, healthy, prosperous, and
educated, men would go on inventing and creating opportunities to amplify
the possibilities of life. These inventions would mean radical
transformations. For we are bent upon establishing more in this nation
than a minimum of comfort. A liberal people would welcome social
inventions as gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would fear is