a
recent letter to New Jersey Democrats we find him warning his party, or
more properly the nation, of the domestic social changes necessarily
flowing from his international program. While rightly resolved to
prosecute the war on the battle lines to the utmost limit of American
resources, he points out that the true significance of the conflict lies
in "revolutionary change." "Economic and social forces," he says, "are
being released upon the world, whose effect no political seer dare to
conjecture." And we "must search our hearts through and through and make
them ready for the birth of a new day--a day we hope and believe of
greater opportunity and greater prosperity for the average mass of
struggling men and women." He recognizes that the next great step in
the development of democracy which the war must bring about--is the
emancipation of labour; to use his own phrase, the redemption of masses
of men and women from "economic serfdom." "The old party slogans," he
declares, "will mean nothing to the future."

Judging from this announcement, the President seems prepared to condemn
boldly all the rotten timbers of the social structure that have outlived
their usefulness--a position that hitherto no responsible politician has
dared to take. Politicians, on the contrary, have revered the dead wood,
have sought to shore the old timbers for their own purposes. But so far
as any party is concerned, Mr. Wilson stands alone. Both of the two
great parties, the Republican and the Democratic, in order to make a show
of keeping abreast of the times, have merely patched their platforms with
the new ideas. The Socialist Party in the United States is relatively
small, is divided against itself, and has given no evidence of a
leadership of broad sanity and vision. It is fortunate we have been
spared in this country the formation of a political labour party, because
such a party would have been composed of manual workers alone, and hence
would have tended further to develop economic class consciousness, to
crystallize class antagonisms. Today, however, neither the Republican
nor the Democratic party represents the great issue of the times; the
cleavage between them is wholly artificial. The formation of a Liberal
Party, with a platform avowedly based on modern social science, has
become essential. Such a party, to be in harmony with our traditions and
our creed, to arrest in our democracy the process of class stratification