These are negative signs of progress, if one will, but none the less impressive for that. They indicate a growing sense of discomfort in the environment provided by established institutions, and a loss of faith in those institutions as they deteriorate under the spread of their own corruption. On the positive side one may cite the growing power of economic organization, and its tendency to displace political organization. The appearance in the American Congress of a group known as the “farm-bloc” is an interesting instance of this tendency. Here is a group of political representatives with whom an economic interest is frankly placed ahead of political affiliation. They are primarily neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither conservatives nor progressives; they are primarily representative of a producing group. As such, they stand for a departure from the theory of representative political government, which assumes that representation shall be not industrial but geographic. According to this theory, the representatives from each arbitrarily fixed geographical unit are supposed to represent the interests of all the citizens within that unit. This evidently leaves out of account not only the fact that economic interests are primarily industrial or occupational and only secondarily and fortuitously sectional, but also the fact that the economic interests within a given area may be mutually inimical. In practice, of course, political representatives have really represented the dominant economic interest within their allotted territory, the interest which has exercised the strongest political influence; but since in theory they must represent all interests, they have not been able to represent that dominant interest openly, but have had to resort to subterfuge and dishonesty. Even the members of the farm-bloc, were they representing districts where agriculture was not the dominant industry, would no doubt be less open in their espousal of its interest. None the less they have dared, in disregard of party-discipline, to form a bloc which stands squarely for the interest of a producing class; and in doing so they have taken a step towards the system of industrial representation which has of late made great strides in European countries, more especially in Russia and Germany. Although the group which has taken this step may be unimportant politically, save when a close division chances to throw the balance of power into its hands, the step it has taken is of the utmost importance; for if economic representation should proceed until it eventually superseded geographical representation, the change would not only involve the destruction of the bipartisan machine which controls government in this country; it would naturally bring about an open alignment of the producing interests against the interests of exploitation, and thus make clear the final and fundamental issue of which I have spoken--the question whether economic exploitation is to