How gradual has been the process of emancipation from intellectual bondage! How inevitably people are limited by the terms in which they think! A generation of men has been consumed by the shibboleth “reform within the party,”--a generation of educated and right-minded men, who accomplished in their day much good, and left the country better than they found it, but are floating to-day like hulks in the trough of the sea of politics, because all their mind and all their energy were exhausted in discovering certain superficial evils and in fighting them. Their analysis of political elements left the deeper causes mysterious. They did not see mere human nature. They still treated Republicanism and Democracy--empty superstitions--as ideas, and they handled with reverence the bones of bogus saints, and the whole apparatus of clap-trap by which they had been governed. And yet it is owing to the activity of these men that the deeper political conditions became visible. Men cannot transcend their own analysis and see themselves under the microscope. The work we do transforms us into social factors. We are a part of the changes we bring in. Before we know it, we ourselves are the problem. The Mugwumps revolt and defeat Blaine. They strengthen the Democratic party. They again revolt and defeat Bryan, and strengthen the Republican party. So in the little towns all over the country, on local issues the Democrats are put out for being dishonest, or the Republicans are put out for being dishonest. Through this process the younger generation has been led to note one fact: both parties are dishonest. “Ah! but,” says the parent, “I am a good Democrat. My party is not dishonest all the time. It needs discipline.” It is too late: the young man hates both parties equally. He now looks at his father, and sees in him a sample of corrupted intelligence, a man able to repeat meaningless phrases, and he draws hope from the conclusion. It was natural that the father should have been boss-ridden all his life, because he could be whistled back to support iniquity by an appeal to party loyalty. He belonged to a race that had lost the power of political initiative. They could not act alone. They must daub themselves with party names or they would catch cold. They had not the stomach to be merely men. Thirty years ago one-half of society thought that every Democrat was a rebel and a scoundrel. The world to that society was composed of two classes,--Republicans (righteous men), Democrats (villains). Twenty years of an almost steady growth in the power of self-government or of what the Germans would call civic consciousness, has barely sufficed to strike off the adjectives, but it has left mankind still divided, as before.