a dangerous weapon in the hands of factious and merely revolutionary
agitators, and even that such a principle is only a partial and
poverty-stricken statement of the purpose of a democratic polity. The
logic of its purposes will compel it to favor the principle of
responsible representative government, and it will seek to forge
institutions which will endow responsible political government with
renewed life. Above all, it may discover that the attempt to unite the
Hamiltonian principle of national political responsibility and
efficiency with a frank democratic purpose will give a new meaning to
the Hamiltonian system of political ideas and a new power to democracy.

III

WILLIAM J. BRYAN AS A REFORMER

One would hardly dare to assert that such a future for the reforming
agitation is already prophesied by the history of reform; but the
divergence between different classes of the reformers is certainly
widening, and some such alignment can already be distinguished. Hitherto
I have been classing reformers together and have been occupied in
pointing out the merits and failings which they possess in common. Such
a method of treatment hardly does justice to the significance of their
mutual disagreements, or to the individual value of their several
personalities and points of view. In many instances their disagreements
are meaningless, and are not the result of any genuine conviction; but
in other instances they do represent a relevant and significant conflict
of ideas. It remains to be seen, consequently, what can be made out of
their differences of opinion and policy, and whether they point in the
direction of a gradual transformation of the agitation for reform. For
this purpose I shall select a number of leading reformers whose work has
been most important, and whose individual opinions are most significant,
and seek some sort of an appraisal both of the comparative value of
their work and of the promise of their characteristic ideas. The men who
naturally suggest themselves for this purpose are William J. Bryan,
William Travers Jerome, William Randolph Hearst, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Each of these gentlemen throughout his public life has consistently
stood for reform of one kind or another; and together they include
almost every popular brand or phase thereof. Reform as a practical
agitation is pretty well exhausted by the points of view of these four
gentlemen. They exhibit its weakness and its strength, its illusi