Somehow the last two generations, and especially the last ten years, have revealed many things hitherto hidden, and as we envisage society as it has come to be, estimating it by new-found standards and establishing new comparisons through a recovery of a more just historical sense, the question comes whether it is indeed more wholesome, more beautiful, more normal to man as he is, than the older society that in varying forms but always the same principle, had held throughout all history until the new model came in, now hardly a century ago.

I do not think this wistful and bewildered looking backward is particularly due to a new desire for beauty, that comeliness of condition that existed then and has now given place to gross ugliness and ill-conditioned manners and ways.  Rather it seems to me it is due to a sense of irrationality and fundamental injustice in the present order, coupled with a new terror of the proximate issue as this already is revealing itself amongst many peoples.  We resent the high estate, purchasable and purchased, of the cynical intriguer and the vulgar profiteer, of the tradesman in “big business,” the cheap prophet and the pathetic progeny of “successful men” fast reverting to type.  We know our city councils and our state legislatures and our houses of congress, we know our newspapers, their standards and the motive powers behind them, and what they record of the character and the doings of what they call “society men and women.”  Above all we know that under the ancient regime, in spite of manifold failures, shortcomings and disloyalty, there was such a thing as a standard of honour, a principle of chivalry, an impulse to unselfish service, a criterion of courtesy and good manners; we look for these things now in vain, except amongst those little enclaves of oblivion where the old character and old breeding still maintain a fading existence, and as we consider what we have become we sometimes wonder if the price we have paid for “democracy” was not too extortionate.

Above all, we are tempted to this query when we think of our vanishing standards of right and wrong, of our progressive reversal of values, of our diminishing stock of social character.  We tore down in indignant revolt the rotten fabric of a bad social system when it had so far declined from its ideal and its former estate that it could no longer be endured, and we made a new thing, full as we were with the fire of desire for a new righteousness and a new system that would compass it.  Perhaps we did well, at least we hardly could have done anything else; but now we are again in the position of our forefathers who saw things as they were and acted with force and decision.  There are as many counts against our society of plutocrats, politicians and proletarians, mingled in complete and ineffective confusion, as there were against the aristocracies, so called, of the eighteenth century.  Perhaps there are more, at least many of them are different, but the indictment is no less sweeping.