tory. For years this
party has been forming. Parties exist for the people; not the people for
parties. Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work
of the parties instead of the parties doing the work of the people--and
the politicians own the parties. The people vote for one party and find
their hopes turned to ashes on their lips; and then to punish that
party, they vote for the other party. So it is that partisan victories
have come to be merely the people's vengeance; and always the secret
powers have played their game.

Like other free people, most of us Americans are progressive or
reactionary, liberal or conservative. The neutrals do not count. Yet
to-day neither of the old parties is either wholly progressive or wholly
reactionary. Democratic politicians and office seekers say to
reactionary Democratic voters that the Democratic party is reactionary
enough to express reactionary views; and they say to progressive
Democrats that the Democratic party is progressive enough _to_ express
progressive views. At the same time, Republican politicians and office
seekers say the same thing about the Republican party to progressive and
reactionary Republican voters.

Sometimes in both Democratic and Republican States the progressives get
control of the party locally and then the reactionaries recapture the
same party in the same State; or this process is reversed. So there is
no nation-wide unity of principle in either party, no stability of
purpose, no clear-cut and sincere program of one party at frank and open
war with an equally clear-cut and sincere program of an opposing party.

This unintelligent tangle is seen in Congress. Republican and Democratic
Senators and Representatives, believing alike on broad measures
affecting the whole Republic, find it hard to vote together because of
the nominal difference of their party membership. When, sometimes, under
resistless conviction, they do vote together, we have this foolish
spectacle: legislators calling themselves Republicans and Democrats
support the same policy, the Democratic legislators declaring that that
policy is Democratic and Republican legislators declaring that it is
Republican; and at the very same time other Democratic and Republican
legislators oppose that very same policy, each of them declaring that it
is not Democratic or not Republican.

The condition makes it impossible most of the time, and hard at any
time, for the people's legi