dition spreading to other sections that Mr.
Holmes feels that the only hope of obtaining sufficient farm labor is to
persuade the children of the farmers to remain on the farms.

"Fifty years ago," said _McClure's Magazine_ in a recent announcement,
which sums up some of the chief elements of the present situation, "we
were a nation of independent farmers and small merchants. To-day we are
a nation of corporation employees." There can be no question that we are
seeing the formation in this country of very definitely marked economic
and social classes such as have long prevailed in the older countries of
Europe. And this class division explains _why the political democracies
of such countries as France, Switzerland, the United States, and the
British Colonies show no tendency to become real democracies_. Not only
do classes defend every advantage and privilege that economic evolution
brings them, but, what is more alarming, they utilize these advantages
chiefly to give their children greater privileges still. Unequal
opportunities visibly and inevitably breed more unequal opportunities.

The definite establishment of industrial capitalism, a century or more
ago, and later the settlement of new countries, brought about a
revolutionary advance towards equality of opportunity. But the further
development of capitalism has been marked by steady retrogression. Yet
nearly all capitalist statesmen, some of them honestly, insist that
equality of opportunity is their goal, and that we are making or that we
are about to make great strides in that direction. Not only is the
establishment of equality of opportunity accepted as the aim that must
underlie all our institutions, even by conservatives like President
Taft, but it is agreed that it is a perfectly definite principle. Nobody
claims that there is any vagueness about it, as there is said to be
about the demand for political, economic, or social equality.

It may be that the economic positions in society occupied by men and
women who have now reached maturity are already to some slight degree
distributed according to relative fitness; and, even though this fitness
is due, not to native superiority, but to unfair advantages and unequal
opportunity, it may be that a general change for the better is here
impossible until a new generation has appeared. But there is no reason,
except the opposition of parents who want privileges for their
children, why every child in every civilize