504 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tendency toward a rigid bureaucracy, with its moral perversion 

 and industrial paralysis, has become painfully manifest. The 

 centralization of the Federal Government, which set in so irre- 

 sistibly with the civil war, has spread like a pest to the State and 

 municipal governments, which wield an authority over the indi- 

 vidual far in excess of the fears of the fathers. The same si:)irit 

 has entered political parties and reduced them to powerful mech- 

 anisms almost military in perfection and despotism. It has seized 

 upon the laboring man and capitalist, and arrayed them in bitter 

 enmity and bloody conflict. It has reached the trades and profes- 

 sions, and developed in them the most odious traits of intolerance 

 and monopoly. It has invaded social life even. There it has 

 created a multitude of organizations with an exclusive and 

 aggressive temper and a feudal love of pretension and show.* 

 When a nation falls, like another priest of Apollo, into the stran- 

 gling coils of such a system of organization, every part of which is 

 made firm and unyielding by some law in violation of right or 

 in concession of privilege, it has reached the limit of evolution. 

 Immobile and unprogressive, its people, grown greedy, deceitful 

 and barbarous,t lose the capacity to think or to care for themselves. 

 The Government, also become depraved and incapable, degener- 

 ates into a huge machine to oppress and exploit. Thus a free 

 democracy is turned into a Roman or Bourbon despotism that 

 only a shock like an irruption of barbarians or a terrific explo- 

 sion like 'a great revolution can awaken and rescue from the 

 lethargy of death. 



But from democracy as a condition of freedom under moral 

 control, every achievement within the reach of human effort may 

 be expected. Under its regime society remains fluent and mobile, 



and animating, furnishing aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthen- 

 ing the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better 

 worth belonging to." 



* I refer particularly to the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Grand Army societies, and to 

 various uniform and semi-secret orders. Referring to the lecrowning of the " Queen of the 

 Society of Holland Dames of New Netherlands," a paragraph in a daily newspaper says, 

 " Almost royal state will be attempted, the lady riding on coronation day from her home to 

 the Waldorf in a stately carriage drawn by six white horses, and bedecked with orange-col- 

 ored ribbons and flowers." Everybody will recall the interest aroused by the exclusion 

 from one of these societies of a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, on the ground that his 

 relations with women had not been above reproach. For a further account of the Colonial 

 societies, see Ladies' Home Journal, July, 1S97, p. 10. 



\ Evidence of this spirit is to be found already in the various trades and professions that 

 seek protective legislation, and also in the testimony of the tariff beggars before the Ways 

 and Means Committee last winter. They show hardly more consideration for their victims 

 than would a wolf for an infant it had found playing in its path. People really civilized 

 could never have permitted the legislation that threw thousands of Welsh tin-plate makers 

 and Austrian button makers out of employment subsequent to the enactment of the lIcKin- 

 ley bill in 1890, 



