rs to understand the methods
whereby the purposes of a reformed democracy can be achieved. No
progress was made towards the solution of the slavery question until the
question itself was admitted to be national in scope, and its solution a
national responsibility. No substantial progress had been made in the
direction of reform until it began to be understood that here, also, a
national responsibility existed, which demanded an exercise of the
powers of the central government. Reform is both meaningless and
powerless unless the Jeffersonian principle of non-interference is
abandoned. The experience of the last generation plainly shows that the
American economic and social system cannot be allowed to take care of
itself, and that the automatic harmony of the individual and the public
interest, which is the essence of the Jeffersonian democratic creed, has
proved to be an illusion. Interference with the natural course of
individual and popular action there must be in the public interest; and
such interference must at least be sufficient to accomplish its
purposes. The house of the American democracy is again by way of being
divided against itself, because the national interest has not been
consistently asserted as against special and local interests; and again,
also, it can be reunited only by being partly reconstructed on better
foundations. If reform does not and cannot mean restoration, it is bound
to mean reconstruction.

The reformers have come partly to realize that the Jeffersonian policy
of drift must be abandoned. They no longer expect the American ship of
state by virtue of its own righteous framework to sail away to a safe
harbor in the Promised Land. They understand that there must be a
vigorous and conscious assertion of the public as opposed to private and
special interests, and that the American people must to a greater extent
than they have in the past subordinate the latter to the former. They
behave as if the American ship of state will hereafter require careful
steering; and a turn or two at the wheel has given them some idea of the
course they must set. On the other hand, even the best of them have not
learned the name of its ultimate destination, the full difficulties of
the navigation, or the stern discipline which may eventually be imposed
upon the ship's crew. They do not realize, that is, how thoroughly
Jeffersonian individualism must be abandoned for the benefit of a
genuinely individual and soci