She boasted that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular
government; but now she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are
at work forces which she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.

Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience,
who did not care for the Nation, could put this whole country into a
flame? Don't you know that this country from one end to another
believes that something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for
some man without conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way.
Follow me!"--and lead in paths of destruction.

The old order changeth--changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and
equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of
reconstruction.

I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very
little of it has been blind or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to
say, as if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness,
that every age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more
full of change than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the
struggle for change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so
great a scale as in this in which we are taking part.

The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and
normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into
another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself
over, in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical
analysis of its very elements; is questioning its oldest practises as
freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its
life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical
reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of
generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution. We are
in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a
temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may
itself undergo a radical modification in the process. I doubt if any
age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of
radical and extended changes in its economic and political practise.

We stand in the presence of a revolution--not a bloody revolution,
America is not given to the spilling of blood--but a silent revolution
whereby America will insist upon recovering in practise those ideals
which she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to