e; we are offered the platform we
want; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we get absolutely
nothing." So they began to ask: "What is the use of voting? We know that
the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and
therefore it is useless to turn in either direction."

This is not confined to some of the state governments and those of some of
the towns and cities. We know that something intervenes between the
people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at
Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.

Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution?
Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which we see
reigning in the determination of our public life and our public policy.
There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence. 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 the other 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 practices as freely as its
newest, scrutinizin