But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the law over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, there remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of the French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar great measures of class legislation, if you will.  I confess I am one of those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the structure of society itself.  The process of freeing man from the fetters of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men’s passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid to the door of society itself?  Charity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills; nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal.  Social justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutions and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness.  Social justice, so defined, under temporal conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope.  What matters it?  It is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman’s dream.

Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy.  They have been working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation has grown great in their charge.  What, in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the configuration of a national life?