If the question of the moment happens to be a class question, the modern way of treating it is by open discussion, in which each side strives to understand the other’s point of view, if only to refute it. This inestimable good has democracy brought us, among others, that we dare not, cannot, ignore the other side; we must meet it in open discussion. This, again, is a growing condition. All who can remember twenty-five or thirty years back must be impressed with the tendency of everything to come into the open. Formerly the domination of the rich was a covert thing, very little being said about it because it was unobserved, or accepted as part of the natural order. And the like was true of a hundred other questionable or vicious conditions—political corruption, sexual vice, and the like. At present the interest and intelligence directed toward class questions is too great to permit of underhand or secretive methods. Wrongs are brought to light sooner or later and react against those who practise them. It would be hard to say whether labor has been most hurt by venality and intimidation on the part of some of its leaders, or capital by its corruption of politics and exploitation of the people. Public opinion regards both with deep resentment, and is determined to know the truth regarding them. And when two parties are brought to discuss an issue before the public as arbiter, they are in great degree reconciled or united by the process. That is, they are brought to recognize and appeal to common principles of justice which the public accepts as binding on all. The airing of fundamental economic questions in our day is educative to all concerned. The tendency of it is to draw our ideas and practices out of the dimness of a class environment and show them in the white light of the public square, where every passer-by is a critic; so that we ourselves are led to take a universal view of them. This would be true even if there were no authoritative expression of public opinion in government, but it is all the more true because there is such an expression. It is an excellent thing, as regards solidarity, that every faction must stand well with the public under peril of hostile regulation. This means, if only we can make the public mind penetrating and intelligent, that it will not pay to do the things that cannot bear the light. Those who doubt our ability to control the capitalist class perhaps give too little weight to the moral elements in the situation. The privileged classes of the past have been strong because they were, or seemed to be, essential to social order and the maintenance of the higher traditions. If their function in this regard is diminishing, as there is reason to think, then the moral position of any class attempting to continue the old inequalities as against practicable reforms, will be extremely weak. No merely selfish interest, under modern conditions, can long make head against the general current of moral judgment.