s inevitably for
the best, I think it clear that within recent years an uneasy suspicion
has come into being that the principle of authority has been dangerously
impaired, and that the social system, if it is to cohere, must be
reorganized. So far as my observation has extended, such intuitions are
usually not without an adequate cause, and if there be reason for
anxiety anywhere, it surely should be in the United States, with its
unwieldy bulk, its heterogeneous population, and its complex government.
Therefore, I submit, that an hour may not be quite wasted which is
passed in considering some of the recent phenomena which have appeared
about us, in order to ascertain if they can be grouped together in any
comprehensible relation.

About a century ago, after, the American and French Revolutions and the
Napoleonic wars, the present industrial era opened, and brought with it
a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment
must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for
lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial
capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers.
As nothing in the universe is stationary, ruling classes have their
rise, culmination, and decline, and I conjecture that this class
attained to its acme of popularity and power, at least in America,
toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. I draw
this inference from the fact that in the next quarter resistance to
capitalistic methods began to take shape in such legislation as the
Interstate Commerce Law and the Sherman Act, and almost at the opening
of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its
mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. History may not be a very
practical study, but it teaches some useful lessons, one of which is
that nothing is accidental, and that if men move in a given direction,
they do so in obedience to an impulsion as automatic as is the impulsion
of gravitation. Therefore, if Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries
are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as
deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone. This problem has long
interested me, and I harbor no doubt not only that the equilibrium of
society is very rapidly shifting, but that Mr. Roosevelt has,
half-automatically, been stimulated by the instability about him to seek
for a new centre of social gr