ntest polled the
largest numbers of votes were both "progressive."

So it seems settled that we are to "progress." But whither--and into
what? Is there any clear purpose before our new leaders, and how does
it differ from mankind's former purposes? That is what President Wilson
tries to tell us.

There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that
are discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That
singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done
twenty years ago.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has
broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it
was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We
have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom;
and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old
political formulae do not fit the present problems; they read now like
documents taken out of a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if
they belonged to a past age which men have almost forgotten. Things
which used to be put into the party platforms of ten years ago would
sound antiquated if put into a platform now. We are facing the
necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the
old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of
citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not
been made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the
average man. The life of the nation has grown infinitely varied. It
does not center now upon questions of governmental structure or of the
distribution of governmental powers. It centers upon questions of the
very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is
only the instrument. Our development has run so fast and so far along
the line sketched in the earlier days of constitutional definition, has
so crossed and interlaced those lines, has piled upon them such novel
structures of trust and combination, has elaborated within them a life
so manifold, so full of forces which transcend the boundaries of the
country itself and fill the eyes of the world, that a new nation seems
to have been created which the old formulae do not fit or afford a
vital interpretation of.

We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We
have come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we
used to do business--when we d