Hence it is not surprising that in the republican platform for 1910, after the University of Wisconsin had gone through a trying siege in which its professors were again accused of being socialists and of "interfering in politics," that a political party, dominated by a student of Bascom's, and having in it many of the students of Ely, should have repeated word for word the same phrases which were written seventeen years previous, nor that the class of 1910 should have presented a tablet to the University of Wisconsin, inscribing upon it the following portion of that acquittal:—
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."
Thus succeeding Bascom and Ely came a long line of young men, many of them of German or Scandinavian stock, who were impressed with the ideas that Ely expounded at that time. He preached a curious new doctrine, a "new individualism," that men deserved the right of opportunity and benefited by it; that it was the duty of the state to preserve to them opportunities; that the state was a necessary good and not a necessary evil;
