All over the Union people are coming to feel that they have no control over the course of affairs.  I live in one of the greatest States in the Union, which was at one time in slavery.  Until two years ago we had witnessed with increasing concern the growth in New Jersey of a spirit of almost cynical despair.  Men said, “We vote; we are offered the platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we get absolutely nothing.”  So they began to ask, “What is the use of voting?  We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.”

It is not confined to some of the State governments and those of some of the towns and cities.  We know that something intervenes between the people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at Washington.  It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.

Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution?  Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which we see reigning in the determination of our public life and our public policy.  There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence.  She boasted that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular government; but now she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are at work forces which she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.

Don’t you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who did not care for the Nation, could put this whole country into a flame?  Don’t you know that this country from one end to another believes that something is wrong?  What an opportunity it would be for some man without conscience to spring up and say:  “This is the way.  Follow me!”—­and lead in paths of destruction.

The old order changeth—­changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of reconstruction.

I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very little of it has been blind or merely instinctive.  It is the fashion to say, as if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as in this in which we are taking part.

The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into another, its natural heir and successor.  Society is looking itself over, in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of its very elements; is questioning its oldest practises as freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution.  We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification in the process.  I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic and political practise.