What ceaseless endeavor! What patient trial of various forms of organization! We live in a society where egoism is so thoroughly organized that there is hardly a flicker of faith that cannot be made to heat the devil’s pot. The dragon stands ready to eat up the child as soon as it shall be born. You cannot hitch your horse to anything without helping drag the juggernaut. Before you know it, virtue is pocketed. Take the most obvious case. The reformers imagine they are in politics and must win at all costs. One enthusiast calls twenty friends into a room and organizes a club--and the club ties his hands and sells out to the nearest bidder. Before he knows it he has been organized back into Tammany Hall. You begin with a call to arms and a plan of organization. The men come to you in a moment of hope, showing every shade of intelligence, every stage of opinion,--one because he believes in your candidate; one because he hates Tammany Hall; one because he wants prominence; all because they do not expect to be alone. The men who volunteer have not a clear notion of what they are in for. They thought it was a movement to clean the streets. In the course of their campaign it develops into an attack on a bank. They thought it was a town movement. Some stage of it affects national politics. They thought it was a Roosevelt movement. It turns out to involve hostility to Roosevelt. Your muster shows the vague hope of a lot of men who are utterly incompetent, undisciplined, ignorant. They are merchants, lawyers, doctors, professors, clergymen, the respectability and intelligence of the town; and so far as self-government goes they are the tattered children of tyranny. Good God, what an army! At the first trumpet they scatter. One sells out, one recants, one disappears. They are anywhere and nowhere, a ship of fools, a barnyard. The execution of the one idea for which they were brought together has scattered them like sheep.