a uniformly good record must have been the result of an honest, intelligent, and insistent endeavor to legislate in the public interest.
Yet while the Democrats have remained ascendant, their ascendancy has become much more precarious and exacting. They have become more than ever a governing minority. Their very success in reconciling progressivism with Democracy has been slowly tending to consolidate the opposition. The influence of the progressive element within their own ranks will be weakened just in so far as the Progressive party falls to pieces and its members revert to Republicanism. Public opinion is acquiescent, but dangerously apathetic. The administration has enlisted a sufficient measure of popular respect, but it has not kindled popular enthusiasm or touched the popular imagination. The association of progressivism with partisan Democracy has made it more efficient for certain limited purposes, but less interesting and significant. The progressive movement has lost thereby singleness of purpose, alertness of intelligence, intensity of conviction, and a seductive vista of future achievement.
The work of a sincerely progressive democracy has only begun. The legislation passed by the Democratic party has not made any impression upon the more serious and difficult social and industrial problems of contemporary America. The consumer's need for a lower cost of living has been left unsatisfied; the business organization of the country continues to be wasteful and inefficient; the financial system of the Federal Government remains no less extravagant and irresponsible; nothing has been done to diminish unemployment, to improve the general standard of living, to remove the causes of increasing unrest among wage-earners. The President has sometimes talked as if his program of tariff revision, banking reorganization and anti-trust legislation contained a complete and final solution of the problems of modern American democracy. These measures are to provide for a new constitution of freedom, which is also a constitution of peace. If the President and his party are actually deceived by such phrases, they will pay dearly for their unintelligence. Noting of any importance has as yet been accomplished to bestow freedom and peace on the American nation. The new Democratic Congress will be confronted with legislative responsibilities even graver than those which have already been met, and these new responsibilities will put their combination of partisanship with progressivism to a still severer test. The combination may survive, but if so, the Democracy will have to pay for the privilege of keeping such good company by abandoning many of their traditional shibboleths and by seeking an access of inward light and grace.
The End of American Isolation
THE self-complacent isolation of a great people has never received a ruder shock than that which was dealt to the American nation by the outbreak of the European war. We have long been congratulating ourselves on something more than an official independence of Europe. We considered ourselves free in a finer and a deeper sense—free from the poison of inherited national antipathies, free from costly and distracting international entanglements, free from a more than incidental reliance on foreign markets for the sale of our products, free to make mistakes with impunity and to gather fruits by merely shaking the tree. We were more nearly self-contained, more completely the master of our own destiny, than any other nation of history. Yet this consummate example of political independence has been subjected to a visitation of fate almost as disconcerting as those which beset wandering Indian tribes. There broke over the country a European war which the American people individually and collectively were powerless to prevent or to mitigate, yet which may have consequences upon the future and policy of the country as profound and far-reaching as our self-made Civil War. Independence in the sense of isolation has proved to be a delusion. It was born of the same conditions and the same misunderstandings as our traditional optimistic fatalism; and it must be thrown into the same accumulating scrapheap of patriotic misconceptions.
The American nation was wholly unprepared to cope with such a serious political and economic emergency. It possessed no organization and no equipment with which to protect its citizens against the loss and the suffering caused by the war. It was equally unprepared to take advantage of the opportunities for an increase in foreign trade which the sudden belligerency of the European powers thrust into its hands. No disposition was shown to sit down patiently under the affliction. The industries and interests whose prosperity was affected jumped swiftly to the conclusion that a loss which was the result of an international crisis, and which was serious enough to threaten their own subsequent economic efficiency, should not fall upon themselves alone, but should be redistributed. They all promptly appealed to the government for assistance either in carrying the burden or in taking advantage of the unexpected opportunities. The railroads demanded an increase in rates as compensation for diminution in business. The cotton-growers tried to draw an additional five cents a pound for their cotton out of the United States Treasury. Congress was asked to provide the ships which were needed to transport American
