made him, and through him the nation, an easy victim of the thieves. Our other presidents were amiable nonentities, or, like Cleveland, useful agents of the magnates. The Senate became a notorious club of millionaires. The House of Representatives was a bleating flock of sheep, herded by cunning shepherds of the tariff. The congressional records and biographies of forty years may be searched in vain for any capable discussion of the real issues of life. It would be impossible to find in the contemporary cabinets of Europe men so little informed about anything deeper than bookkeepers' economics.

Literature, which reflects the soul of a nation, fell upon evil days. Before the war, when the population of the country was twenty million, there were five or six important men of letters. A generation later, when the population had doubled, there was only one first-rate literary genius, Mark Twain.

For our grandfathers we can have some respect. For the work of our fathers we cannot have great filial admiration. They made or permitted a shoddy, corrupt civilization. They had but one idea, to get rich. Now, the pursuit of money and the constructive enterprise

which it inspires are wholesome and normal; they have animated all healthy periods of all nations. The trouble with the generation which is now happily passing is that it did little else than strive for individual fortune. Its heroes, its representative products, typical though grotesquely exaggerated, are Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. It made America the happy hunting-ground of swindlers. It built ugly cities, which it mismanaged until American graft became a byword in the world. It set up universities which look like shoe factories, and placed over them commercial persons whose chief function was to cajole millionaires. It subordinated science to the uses of trade. The history of railroads for the last fifty years is a scandalous record of physical and financial wrecks. Capitalism, uncontrolled, lawless even by its own definition of law, blossomed in a rank abundance unknown in any other country at any other time. And because it is held that the fullest development of capitalism is the ripest soil for Socialism, revolutionists all over the world, prophets as unlike as Tolstoy and the youngest American syndicalist, have believed that America would be the first nation to be captured by the revolution.

One effect of the failure of the generation which is now fortunately dying was to disillusionize the radical thinkers of all countries as to the value of the republican form of government. Immigrants who thought that monarchy was their trouble at home discovered that essential liberty was not greater in America than in the old countries of Western Europe. Thinkers had opportunity to meditate the fact that even backward Russia produced a body of literature compared to which American literature is a puerile school composition. Worse than that for genius may be an accidentthe common run of American thinking was of inferior quality. Something in our free institutions militated against real freedom. The American, in an atmosphere reported to be high and open, was timid, awfully afraid of the opinions of his neighbors, willing to take the stupidest abuses lying down, a pusillanimous Sunday-school scholar whispering below his breath matters which Europeans in manly fashion discuss aloud. The freedom of the press when tested proved to be seriously restricted, and freedom of speech in many parts of the country was so far abrogated that it was necessary to get arrested and make a fight

through the courts to resecure a traditional privilege. The American bourgeois thumping his chest and proclaiming himself an independent citizen of the greatest country in the world was servilely receptive of European ideas, especially superficial ideas. And clever business man as he was, he would pay an extra price for anything with a foreign label on it. Perhaps he knew the quality of his own goods. The vices of ignorance, timidity, lack of intellectual courage were not confined to the middle and upper classes. Emma Goldman, who knows at first hand working people in many countries, says that the American workman reads less and thinks less than his European brothers. Whatever the virtues of our republican institutions, whatever the influence of those institutions upon our habits of thought and ways of life, people with their eyes open now understand that republicanism in itself means little and that it has obviously not had the effect of making the American in any respect a superior person. On the one hand, American revolutionists see that our peculiar institutions are not worthy of special respect, and, on the other hand, European revolutionists see that it is not worth while to fight for the establishment of

similar institutions in their own land, certainly not at the cost of diverting much strength from the essential struggle for the freedom of the working class.

Parallel to the amazing growth of American capitalism there grew up several parties and organizations in opposition to capital or to some aspect of it. Not all of these organizations were socialistic, not all of them were strictly proletarian.

Besides the Labor Reform party of Massachusetts, already mentioned, there were two other labor movements, short lived but memorable, before the last quarter of the nineteenth century. One was the National Labor Union, of which the Labor Reform party was a sort of political wing. This flourished from 1866 to 1870. It is significant because its declaration of principles was socialistic, because it sought to unite workers in a national body, and because its leaders were Americans. The other was the International Workingmen's Association founded by Germans and inspired by the International in Europe of which Karl Marx was the central figure. The political disturbances which culminated in the Franco-Prussian War and the communes in Paris and other cities put an end