The voting body of Americans who stand behind President Wilson are obviously of the type now generally called progressive.  In the convention which nominated him, the conservative element of the old Democracy struggled long and bitterly against the naming of any “progressive” candidate.  In the Republican party, the strife between conservatism and progress was so bitter as to produce a complete split; and the progressives nominated a candidate of their own, preferring, if they could not control the government themselves, to hand it over to the progressive element among the Democrats.  The former political parties in the United States seem to have been so completely disrupted by recent events that even though they continue to hold some power under the old names, they now stand for wholly different things.  The two parties which in the triangular presidential contest polled the largest numbers of votes were both “progressive.”

So it seems settled that we are to “progress.”  But whither—­and into what?  Is there any clear purpose before our new leaders, and how does it differ from mankind’s former purposes?  That is what President Wilson tries to tell us.

There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on the political platform at the present moment.  That singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society.  Our life has broken away from the past.  The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago.  We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life.  The old political formulae do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.  The older cries sound as if they belonged to a past age which men have almost forgotten.  Things which used to be put into the party platforms of ten years ago would sound antiquated if put into a platform now.  We are facing the necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the average man.  The life of the nation has grown infinitely varied.  It does not center now upon questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers.  It centers upon questions of the very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is only the instrument.  Our development has run so fast and so far along the line sketched in the earlier days of constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which transcend the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the world, that a new nation seems to have been created which the old formulae do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of.