“It was a fanaticism like the Crusades. Indeed, the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy. Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold--and all its symbols, capital, wealth, plutocracy--diabolical. At night, from ten thousand little white schoolhouse windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars. For the thousands who assembled under the schoolhouse lamps believed that when their legislature met and their governor was elected, the millennium would come by proclamation. They sang their barbaric songs in unrhythmic jargon, with something of the same mad faith that inspired the martyrs going to the stake. Far into the night the voices rose--women’s voices, children’s voices, the voices of old men, of youths and of maidens, rose on the ebbing prairie breezes, as the crusaders of the revolution rode home, praising the people’s will as though it were God’s will, and cursing wealth for its iniquity. It was a season of shibboleths and fetiches and slogans. Reason slept; and the passions--jealousy, covetousness, hatred--ran amuck; and whoever would check them was crucified in public contumely.” The demand for governmental regulation has been on the increase since 1896 and has almost worked a revolution in our form of government. I will not discuss the degree to which such an extension of the powers of the central government is desirable. I am aware of the fact that the motive is largely that of protecting the economic independence of the average individual. The point I wish to make is that the methods advocated reveal the change that has come over liberalism. Notwithstanding Jefferson’s statement about the government which governed least, the extensions of the powers of government have not ever been limited to matters industrial, and we find men calling themselves liberals accepting all sorts of restrictions upon their liberty without complaint. Liberalism has taken on a partisan spirit with all the intolerance, hysteria, and coerciveness that usually characterizes crowd movements. The same elements that voted “liberal” with Mr. Bryan thirty years ago, later supported Bryan the fundamentalist, and today are staunch prohibitionists. I cannot help feeling that something of the fundamentalist was lurking under the skin of the American liberal all along. The tradition of personal independence derived from our British ancestors had about reached this stage of decline, when efforts were made to supplant it with a very different type of liberalism from continental Europe.