An agitation of this kind, deriving as it does its principles and purposes from the very source of American democracy, would seem to deserve the support of all good Americans:  and such support was in the beginning expected.  Reformers have always tended to believe that their agitation ought to be and essentially was non-partisan.  They considered it inconceivable either that patriotic American citizens should hesitate about restoring the purity and vigor of American institutions, or such an object should not appeal to every disinterested man, irrespective of party.  It was a fight between the law and its violators, between the Faithful and the Heretic, between the Good and the Wicked.  In such a fight there was, of course, only one aide to take.  It was not to be doubted that the honest men, who constitute, of course, an enormous majority of the “plain people,” would rally to the banners of reform.  The rascals would be turned out; the people would regain their economic opportunities and political rights; and the American democracy would pursue undefiled its triumphant career of legalized prosperity.

These hopes have never been realized.  Reform has rarely been non-partisan—­except in the minds of its more innocent advocates.  Now and then an agitation for municipal reform in a particular city will suffer a spasm of non-partisanship; but the reformers soon develop such lively differences among themselves, that they separate into special groups or else resume their regular party ties.  Their common conception of reform as fundamentally a moral awakening, which seeks to restore the American, political and economic system to its early purity and vigor, does not help them to unity of action or to unity in the framing of a remedial policy.  Different reformers really mean something very different by the traditional system, from which American practice has departed and which they propose to restore.  Some of them mean thereby a condition of spiritual excellence, which will be restored by a sort of politico-moral revivalism and which will somehow make the results of divine and popular election coincide.  Others mean nothing more than the rigid enforcement of existing laws.  Still others mean a new legal expression of the traditional democratic principle, framed to meet the new political and social conditions; but the reformers who agree upon this last conception of reform disagree radically as to what the new legal expression should be.  The traditional system, which they seek to restore, assumes almost as many shapes as there are leading reformers; and as the reforming movement develops, the disagreements among the reformers become more instead of less definite and acute.