From the recent great industrial-social revolution has emerged the America of to-day--a land undreamed by our forefathers, uncomprehended by ourselves. In every essential of life--in education, in comfort, in refinement--there has been an immeasurable advance. And, most important of all, intelligence and that divine, truly democratic spirit of discontent, which has ever been the harbinger of enlightened progress, have penetrated to the remotest farmhouses, and fight a valiant and a winning battle with the sloth and despair of our city slums. Incidental to this evolution, inseparable from it, logically and naturally a part of it, there have been myriad opportunities for a temptation to corruption. And our corruption has complied with corruption’s universal law. It has been in direct proportion to opportunity. As long as only old and familiar forms had to be combated the people did not feel, as they do now, the inadequacy, the utter unfitness of their electoral machinery for the work of selecting and controlling their public administrators. This machinery, with some slight changes, is the same that was used in Athens and that was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It is the crudest and clumsiest device possible for registering the public will. It works fairly well in small communities where the people are not busy, where everybody knows everybody else, where public administrators can be held to strict personal account by their neighbors, their masters. Until the two last centuries the world had little use for electoral machinery. And until the last fifty years, at most, there were no conditions that forcibly demanded the invention of a new electoral machine--one that would permit a people to register their will quickly, without circumlocutions, and at the same time without the haste that makes right action an accident. In addition to this fundamental disadvantage our people are also contending against an almost equally unfortunate limitation. The industrial revolution presses into private service not merely all of the best minds of the nation, but also most of the minds in which large measures of both capacity and character are combined. Even the mediocres who would best fill public office--which in a Democracy should be obedient and never initiatory--have been impressed by high pecuniary rewards into private service. But demand creates supply. Give us a little time and our supply will once more equal the demands upon it. We are manufacturing competent, intelligent men and women workers by the tens and the hundreds of thousands now-a-days--faster than private enterprise can absorb them, in such vast numbers that not the richest plutocracy could seduce and silence all or even a large proportion of them. Give us a little time, another thirty years or so--at most. Meanwhile let us not forget:--