In this last election the people of New York have crippled Platt. It is a service done to the nation. Its consequences are as yet not understood; for the public sees only the gross fact that Tammany is again in power. But the election is memorable. It is a sign of the times. The grip of commerce is growing weaker, the voice of conscience louder. A phase in our history is passing away. That phase was predestined from the beginning. * * * * * The war did no more than intensify existing conditions, both commercial and political. It gave sharp outlines to certain economic phenomena, and made them dramatic. It is due to the war that we are now able to disentangle the threads and do justice to the nation. The corruption that we used to denounce so fiercely and understand so little was a phase of the morality of an era which is already vanishing. It was as natural as the virtue which is replacing it; it will be a curiosity almost before we have done studying it. We see that our institutions were particularly susceptible to this disease of commercialism, and that the sickness was acute, but that it was not mortal. Our institutions survived. SOCIETY II SOCIETY Our institutions have survived, the perils of boss rule are past, and we may look back upon the system with a kind of awe, and recognize how easily the system might have overthrown our institutions and ushered in a period which history would have recorded as the age of the State Tyrants. Let us imagine that some State like Pennsylvania, on which the boss system had been so firmly fixed that a boss was able to bequeath his seat in the United States Senate to his son, had shown forth an ambitious man, a ruler who realized that his function was not one of business, but one of government; let us imagine that a President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, some man of great capacity, had undertaken to rule the State. He would, by his position as State boss, have been able gradually to do away with the petty bosses and petty abuses. He would give the State a general cities law, good schools, clean streets, speedy justice; every necessary municipal improvement. Gas, water, boulevards would be supplied with an economy positively startling to a generation accustomed to jobs. He would destroy the middlemen as Louis XI. destroyed the nobles, and give to his State, for the first time in the history of the country, good government. A benign tyranny, with every department in the hands of experts, makes the strongest form of government in the world. Every class is satisfied. Pennsylvania would have been famous the world over. Its inhabitants would have been proud of it; foreigners would have written books about it; other States would have imitated it. Meanwhile the power of self-government would have been lost.