To carry out our principles we have a plain program of constructive reform.  We mean to tear down only that which is wrong and out of date; and where we tear down we mean to build what is right and fitted to the times.  We harken to the call of the present.  We mean to make laws fit conditions as they are and meet the needs of the people who are on earth to-day.  That we may do this we found a party through which all who believe with us can work with us; or, rather, we declare our allegiance to the party which the people themselves have founded.

For this party comes from the grass roots.  It has grown from the soil of the people’s hard necessities.  It has the vitality of the people’s strong convictions.  The people have work to be done and our party is here to do that work.  Abuse will only strengthen it, ridicule only hasten its growth, falsehood only speed its victory.  For years this party has been forming.  Parties exist for the people; not the people for parties.  Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work of the parties instead of the parties doing the work of the people—­and the politicians own the parties.  The people vote for one party and find their hopes turned to ashes on their lips; and then to punish that party, they vote for the other party.  So it is that partisan victories have come to be merely the people’s vengeance; and always the secret powers have played their game.

Like other free people, most of us Americans are progressive or reactionary, liberal or conservative.  The neutrals do not count.  Yet to-day neither of the old parties is either wholly progressive or wholly reactionary.  Democratic politicians and office seekers say to reactionary Democratic voters that the Democratic party is reactionary enough to express reactionary views; and they say to progressive Democrats that the Democratic party is progressive enough to express progressive views.  At the same time, Republican politicians and office seekers say the same thing about the Republican party to progressive and reactionary Republican voters.

Sometimes in both Democratic and Republican States the progressives get control of the party locally and then the reactionaries recapture the same party in the same State; or this process is reversed.  So there is no nation-wide unity of principle in either party, no stability of purpose, no clear-cut and sincere program of one party at frank and open war with an equally clear-cut and sincere program of an opposing party.

This unintelligent tangle is seen in Congress.  Republican and Democratic Senators and Representatives, believing alike on broad measures affecting the whole Republic, find it hard to vote together because of the nominal difference of their party membership.  When, sometimes, under resistless conviction, they do vote together, we have this foolish spectacle:  legislators calling themselves Republicans and Democrats support the same policy, the Democratic legislators declaring that that policy is Democratic and Republican legislators declaring that it is Republican; and at the very same time other Democratic and Republican legislators oppose that very same policy, each of them declaring that it is not Democratic or not Republican.