forces
that agitate the nation. Politics, as the contributors to the
Congressional Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection
of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily chosen "problems." Those
questions have developed a technique and an interest in them for their
own sake. They are handled with a dull solemnity quite out of proportion
to their real interest. Labor receives only a perfunctory and largely
disingenuous attention; even commerce is handled in a way that expresses
neither its direction nor its public use. Congress has been ready enough
to grant favors to corporations, but where in its wrangling from the
Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic
understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has
either presented the business man with money or harassed him with
bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one
thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for the
nation's advantage.

If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like the union and the
trust, it is no exaggeration to say that it has displayed a modest
ignorance of women's problems, of educational conflicts and racial
aspirations; of the control of newspapers and magazines, the book
publishing world, socialist conventions and unofficial political groups
like the single-taxers.

Such genuine powers do not absorb our political interest because we are
fooled by the regalia of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be
relevant, would obtain a new perspective on these dynamic currents, would
find out the wants they express and the energies they contain, would
shape and direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs and
voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their
following, the intensity of their demands are a fair index of what the
statesman must think about. No lawyer created a trust though he drew up
its charter; no logician made the labor movement or the feminist
agitation. If you ask what for political purposes a nation is, a
practical answer would be: it is its "movements." They are the social
_life_. So far as the future is man-made it is made of them. They show
their real vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little
fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.

There is, of course, much that is dead within the movements. Each one
carries along a quantity of inert and outworn ideas,--not i