In England there developed long ago, perhaps as far back as the days of Shakespeare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and democratic in his sympathies, a curious political animal called the radical-conservative. The radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once said, is a man who would have been a radical outright if radicals had not been dissenters; by which he clearly meant that the species agreed with radical principles, but objected to radicals because they did not have good manners, seldom played cricket, and never belonged to the best clubs. Therefore the radical-conservative stays in his own more congenial class while working for social justice toward all other classes. He is willing to vote with the conservative party in return for concessions in labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguarding of public health. Thence arises the curious circumstance, most mystifying to foreigners, that a good share of the really progressive legislation in Great Britain of the last half-century has been led by young gentlemen from Oxford and Cambridge who have no more intention of becoming part of the proletariate than of leaving off their collars and going without baths. Bismarck was an out-and-out conservative who for his own nefarious ends furthered what a Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory would call radical measures. But Lord Robert Cecil in our own day is a convinced aristocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who is more sincerely effective than many Liberals in various movements which we are accustomed to call reform. The conservative-liberal is quite a different animal and far commoner, far more familiar to Americans, even if they have never called him by that name. His habitat is America, and thanks to the populousness of this country, he is beginning to have a very important influence outside of his habitat. To define him is difficult, but for purposes of rough classification he may be said to be the man whose native liberal instincts have been crystallized by a combination of interesting circumstances--and sometimes petrified. He is the man who was born a liberal in a liberal country and intends to remain as he was born. He is the man who will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence against any later manifestation of the revolutionary spirit. He believes in conserving in unaltered purity the principles of life, government, and industry that his forefathers rightly believed to be liberal. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned policeman, a progressive who stands pat upon his progress, a conservative-liberal. I believe that he is our closest approximation to a typical American mind.