Mr. Hadley points out, seemed likely to secure this result, the fathers published them boldly; when they seemed likely to interfere, they ignored them. The creed, then, which had a religious sanction in an age of moral imagination to men of superb human enthusiasm like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, was the belief that democracy, considered as individual freedom, was the final form of human society. It is idle to deny that a century of trial has somewhat dulled the halo about this ancient concept of democracy, but in my judgment only to men of little faith. It is quite true that our democracy of to-day is not what Rousseau thought it would be, nor Lord Byron, nor Shelley, nor Karl Marx. But as we meditate about it and conclude that it has not realized all of its hopes, we ought to try to settle first what it has done and then place that to its credit. Here are some things that I think democracy has done, or helped to do. It has abated sectarian fury. Sectarian fury is ridiculous in this age; it was not always so. It has abolished slavery. It has protected and enlarged manhood suffrage and has gone far toward womanhood suffrage. It has mitigated much social injustice. It has developed a touching and almost sublime faith in the power of education, illustrating it by expending six hundred million dollars a year in the most daring thing that democracy has ever tried to do; namely, to fit for citizenship every human being born within its borders. It has increased kindness and gentleness, and thus diminished the fury of partisanship. It has preserved the form of the Union through the storm of a civil war, and yet has had power to touch with healing unity and forgiveness its passions and tragedies. It has conquered and civilized a vast continent. It has developed great agencies of culture and has somehow made itself a symbol of individual prosperity. It has developed a common consciousness and a volunteer statesmanship among its free citizens as manifested

more strikingly than elsewhere in the world in great educational, religious, scientific and philanthropic societies, which profoundly influence and mould society. Out of what other State could have issued as a volunteer movement so efficient an agency as the Commission for the Relief of Belgium or the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission? It has permitted and fostered the growth of a public press of gigantic power reflecting the crudities and impulses of a vast and varied population, but charged with a fierce idealism and staunch patriotism that have almost given it a place among the coördinate branches of our organized Government. It has stimulated inventive genius and business enterprise to a point never before reached in human annals. It has brought to American-mindedness millions of men of all races, creeds and ideals. I do not, therefore, think that democracy as it has evolved among us has failed. What autocracy on earth has done as much? It has justified itself of the sufferings and sacrifices and the dreams of the men who established it in this new land. But it has also without doubt, by the very trust that it places in men, developed new shapes of temptations and wrong-doing. Democracy, like a man's character, is never clear out of danger. The moral life of men, said Froude, is like the flight of a bird in the air; he is sustained only by effort, and when he ceases to exert himself he falls. And the same, it seems to me, is impressively true of institutional and governmental life.

Patriotism which is hard to define and new with every age- and public spirit—which is hard to define and new with every age-must constantly redefine themselves. Patriotism meant manhood's rights when Washington took it to his heart. It somehow spelled culture, refinement and distinction of mind when Emerson in his Phi Beta Kappa address besought the sluggish intellect of his country to look up from under its iron lids. It signified National ideals and

theories of government to the soldiers of Lee and to the soldiers of Grant. It meant industrial greatness and a splendid desire to annex nature to man's uses when the great business leaders of this generation and of the last generation built up their great businesses and tied the Union together in a unity of steel and steam more completely than all the wars could do, and did it with a patriotism and a statesmanship and an imagination that no man can deny. The honest business man needs somebody to praise him. He has done a great service in this country, and when he is steady and honest there is no greater force in all our life. A decade ago patriotism in America meant a reaction from an unsocial and selfish individualism to restraint and consideration for the general welfare, expressing itself in a cry for moderation and fairness and justice and sympathy in the use of power and wealth as the states of spirit and mind that alone can safeguard republican ideals. The emphasis, as I have said, was formerly on the rights of man; it is getting to be placed, as Mazzini preached, upon the duties of man. If in our youth and feverish strength there had grown up a spirit of avarice and a desire for quick wealth, and a theory of life in lesser minds that estimated money as everything and was willing to do anything for money, that very fact served to define the patriotic duty and mood of the National mind. This reawakened patriotism of the common good had the advantage of appeal to a sound public conscience, and of being supported by a valid public opinion. The part that vulgar cunning has played in creating great fortunes has been made known to this democracy and they are coming to know the genuine from the spurious, and some who were once looked at with admiration and approval as great ones, are not now seen in that light.

This very growth in discernment gave us power to see in a nobler and truer light, for the people of America, the names

of those upright souls in business and in politics — and there are many noble men in business and politics who have held true in a heady time and who have kept clean and kept human their public sympathies and their republican ideals and by so doing have kept sweet their country's fame. Democracy simply had met and outfaced one of the million moral crises that are likely to assail free government, and I believe that it is cleaner to-day in ruling passion, in motive, and in practice than it has been in fifty years.

It is now clear to all minds that the movement of our business operations in this Republic, unregulated and proceeding along individualistic lines, had come perilously near to developing a scheme of monopoly and a union of our political machinery with the forces of private gain that might easily have transformed our democracy into some ugly form of tyranny and injustice. We have halted this tendency somewhat tardily, but resolutely, and the nerves of the Nation were somewhat shaken by the very thought of what might have been, very much as a man gazes with gratitude and yet with fear upon a hidden precipice over which his pathway led. We had been saying over and over to ourselves with fierce determination that this Nation should remain democratic, and should not become plutocratic or autocratic or socialistic; and we should find the way to guarantee this. All about us were heard the voices of those who thought they saw the way and who were beckoning men to follow, but new dangers faced us, however, even as we left the ancient highway and attempted to cut new paths, for in endeavoring to make it possible for democracy, as we understood it, and a vast industrialism, as we had developed it, to live together justly under the same political roof, we had plainly come to a point where there was danger of our Government developing into a system of State socialism in conflict with our deepest traditions and convictions. The lead

ership of the future, therefore, would have a triple problem -to protect the people against privilege, to raise the levels of democratic living, and to preserve for the people the ancient guarantees and inestimable advantages of representative government and individual initiative.

You will observe that I have thus far spoken as a citizen preoccupied with the thoughts of that ancient world which ended on August 1, 1914, and I have not permitted myself to align and examine in full the perils and weaknesses of democratic society as they had manifested themselves under conditions of peace and apparent prosperity. These weaknesses had already begun, under the strain of ordinary industrial life, to reveal themselves under five general aspects, each aspect being in essence a sort of revulsion or excess of feeling from what were considered definite political virtues:1. A contempt of obedience as a virtue too closely allied to servility.

2. A disregard of discipline as smacking too much of docility.

3. An impatience with trained technical skill as seeming to affirm that one man is not as good as another.

4. A failure to understand the value of the common man as a moral and political asset and an inability to coördinate education to daily life as a means of forwarding national ends and ideals.

5. A crass individualism which exalted self and its rights above society and the solemn social obligation to coöperate for the common good.

The theory of democracy which alone among great human movements had known no setback for a century of time, was fast becoming self-critical and disposed to self-analysis, and especially in America these fundamental weaknesses were being assailed in practical forms. The liberal or progressive