a
hard-shell resistance to change which brings it about explosively.

Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative alike: they do
not preserve what was worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and often
monstrous perversion of the original plan. The emancipation of the slaves
might teach us the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction is
satisfactory to nobody.

Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute.
The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current
until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last
ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes
itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a
nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the
struggle, and as George Santayana says, he is only too likely to redouble
his effort after he has forgotten his aim.

Nobody need waste his time debating whether or not there are to be great
changes. That is settled for us whether we like it or not. What is worth
debating is the method by which change is to come about. Our choice, it
seems to me, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership,
between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them
until they are answered.

When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social
reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of
resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real
task of a leader--a task which has essentially two dimensions. By
becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of
effectiveness: by formulating a program for insurgency he translated it
into terms of public service.

What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level, the socialists have done at
the proletarian. The world has been slow to recognize the work of the
Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering into a civilized program.
It has found an intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise be
purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has been tested recently in the
appearance of the "direct actionists."

They are men who have lost faith in political socialism. Why? Because,
like all other groups, the socialists tend to become routineers, to slip
into an easy reiteration. The direct actionists are a warning to the
Socialist Party that its tactics and its program are not adequate to
domes