In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is the growing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the most disquieting problems.  In America the ‘machine’ takes its worst form in those great new cities whose population and wealth and energy represent the goal towards which the rest of American civilisation is apparently tending.  In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils.  The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial capital, the organised political passions of working men who have passed through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban streets.  Every few years some invention in political method is made, and if it succeeds both parties adopt it.  In politics, as in football, the tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules intended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and men feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as new questions force themselves into politics, that the existing electoral system will not bear the strain of an intensified social conflict.  Many of the arguments used in the discussion of the tariff question in England, or of the concentration of capital in America, or of social—­democracy in Germany, imply this.  Popular election, it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities.  But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalise a trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it.  If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future.  No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund or discovered some other new source of political strength, would have any chance of permanent success.

The appeal, however, in the name of electoral purity, to protectionists, trust-promoters, and socialists that they should drop their various movements and so confine politics to less exciting questions, falls, naturally enough, on deaf ears.