comes, as overwhelming as was the consequent defeat
of the Republican party.

Approached thus, that Convention of 1912 has more than a passing
importance, since it would seem to indicate the ordinary phenomenon,
that a declining favored class is incapable of appreciating an
approaching change of environment which must alter its social status. I
began with the proposition that, in any society which we now understand,
civilization is equivalent to order, and the evidence of the truth of
the proposition is, that amidst disorder, capital and credit, which
constitute the pith of our civilization, perish first. For more than a
century past, capital and credit have been absolute, or nearly so;
accordingly it has not been the martial type which has enjoyed
sovereignty, but the capitalistic. The warrior has been the capitalists'
servant. But now, if it be true that money, in certain crucial
directions, is losing its purchasing power, it is evident that
capitalists must accept a position of equality before the law under the
domination of a type of man who can enforce obedience; their own
obedience, as well as the obedience of others. Indeed, it might occur,
even to some optimists, that capitalists would be fortunate if they
could certainly obtain protection for another fifty years on terms as
favorable as these. But at Chicago, capitalists declined even to
consider receding to a secondary position. Rather than permit the advent
of a power beyond their immediate control, they preferred to shatter the
instrument by which they sustained their ascendancy. For it is clear
that Roosevelt's offence in the eyes of the capitalistic class was not
what he had actually done, for he had done nothing seriously to injure
them. The crime they resented was the assertion of the principle of
equality before the law, for equality before the law signified the end
of privilege to operate beyond the range of law. If this principle which
Roosevelt, in theory at least, certainly embodied, came to be rigorously
enforced, capitalists perceived that private persons would be precluded
from using the functions of sovereignty to enrich themselves. There lay
the parting of the ways. Sooner or later almost every successive ruling
class has had this dilemma in one of its innumerable forms presented to
them, and few have had the genius to compromise while compromise was
possible. Only a generation ago the aristocracy of the South
deliberately chose a civil war rat