I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name, had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the workingmen had learned at last that the system did not “protect” them, and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men so far as I know--M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough to disgust anyone with politics altogether, and to forswear them and parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I can think of. To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well. The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong, and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them, or at least to take some measures against the lie.