in their time. A classmate of Wendell Phillips told me that he saw the coming agitator practising his oratories before a glass and always had thereafter proper contempt for him. He would neither hear him speak nor consider his opinions. The test is rather contemptible, but it is probably as old as the history of man's likes and dislikes.
These periods of revolutionary change are not to be measured by frailties in their leaders. The only measure is the necessity of the movement itself. Political and religious authority had reached an intolerable stage early in the nineteenth century and enough brave men had found it out to make a life-and-death issue. For two generations, in spite of much squalid vanity and dreary demagogic play, it was a rousing struggle for an enlarged and richer human life. These wider opportunities for the mass of men were plainly impossible until the pretentious pieties of authority, arbitrarily enforced, were beaten. But arbitrary power did not then quit the scene. It slowly changed its form, and on the field of industry and commerce it grew great and held its own. Its cumulating power has now reached a climax. It stalks among us so flauntingly that millions of common folk can see it. It has passed from the speculations of students to the growling remonstrance of masses of men. In an age grown acute with democratic feeling, in days when political power or what is believed to be such is passing to the people through direct primaries, recalls and such like devices, our economic destinies seem still to be at the beck and call of elusive and shadowy authorities as ruthless as their predeces-
