would have followed.  Under the traditional American system, with the freedom permitted to the individual, with the restriction placed on the central authority, and with its assumption of a substantial identity between the individual and the public interest—­under such a system unusually energetic and unscrupulous men were bound to seize a kind and an amount of political and economic power which was not entirely wholesome.  They had a license to do so; and if they had failed to take advantage thereof, their failure would have been an indication, not of disinterestedness or moral impeccability, but of sheer weakness and inefficiency.

How utterly confusing it is, consequently, to consider reform as equivalent merely to the restoration of the American democracy to a former condition of purity and excellence!  Our earlier political and economic condition was not at its best a fit subject for any great amount of complacency.  It cannot be restored, even if we would; and the public interest has nothing to gain by its restoration.  The usurpation of power by “trusts” and “Bosses” is more than anything else an expression of a desirable individual initiative and organizing ability—­which have been allowed to become dangerous and partly corrupt, because of the incoherence and the lack of purpose and responsibility in the traditional American political and economic system.  A “purification” might well destroy the good with the evil; and even if it were successful in eradicating certain abuses, would only prepare the way for the outbreak in another form of the tendency towards individual aggrandizement and social classification.  No amount of moral energy, directed merely towards the enforcement of the laws, can possibly avail to accomplish any genuine or lasting reform.  It is the laws themselves which are partly at fault, and still more at fault is the group of ideas and traditional practices behind the laws.

Reformers have failed for the most part to reach a correct diagnosis of existing political and economic abuses, because they are almost as much the victim of perverted, confused, and routine habits of political thought as is the ordinary politician.  They have eschewed the tradition of partisan conformity in reference to controverted political questions, but they have not eschewed a still more insidious tradition of conformity—­the tradition that a patriotic American citizen must not in his political thinking go beyond the formulas consecrated in the sacred American writings.  They adhere to the stupefying rule that the good Fathers of the Republic relieved their children from the necessity of vigorous, independent, or consistent thinking in political matters,—­that it is the duty of their loyal children to repeat the sacred words and then await a miraculous consummation of individual and social prosperity.  Accordingly, all the leading reformers begin by piously reiterating certain phrases about equal rights for all and special privileges