The condition makes it impossible most of the time, and hard at any time, for the people’s legislators who believe in the same broad policies to enact them into logical, comprehensive laws.  It confuses the public mind.  It breeds suspicion and distrust.  It enables such special interests as seek unjust gain at the public expense to get what they want.  It creates and fosters the degrading boss system in American politics through which these special interests work.

This boss system is unknown and impossible under any other free government in the world.  In its very nature it is hostile to general welfare.  Yet it has grown until it now is a controlling influence in American public affairs.  At the present moment notorious bosses are in the saddle of both old parties in various important States which must be carried to elect a President.  This Black Horse Cavalry is the most important force in the practical work of the Democratic and Republican parties in the present campaign.  Neither of the old parties’ nominees for President can escape obligation to these old-party bosses or shake their practical hold on many and powerful members of the National Legislature.

Under this boss system, no matter which party wins, the people seldom win; but the bosses almost always win.  And they never work for the people.  They do not even work for the party to which they belong.  They work only for those anti-public interests whose political employees they are.  It is these interests that are the real victors in the end.

These special interests which suck the people’s substance are bi-partisan.  They use both parties.  They are the invisible government behind our visible government.  Democratic and Republican bosses alike are brother officers of this hidden power.  No matter how fiercely they pretend to fight one another before election, they work together after election.  And, acting so, this political conspiracy is able to delay, mutilate or defeat sound and needed laws for the people’s welfare and the prosperity of honest business and even to enact bad laws, hurtful to the people’s welfare and oppressive to honest business.

It is this invisible government which is the real danger to American institutions.  Its crude work at Chicago in June, which the people were able to see, was no more wicked than its skillful work everywhere and always which the people are not able to see.

But an even more serious condition results from the unnatural alignment of the old parties.  To-day we Americans are politically shattered by sectionalism.  Through the two old parties the tragedy of our history is continued; and one great geographical part of the Republic is separated from other parts of the Republic by an illogical partisan solidarity.

The South has men and women as genuinely progressive and others as genuinely reactionary as those in other parts of our country.  Yet, for well-known reasons, these sincere and honest southern progressives and reactionaries vote together in a single party, which is neither progressive nor reactionary.  They vote a dead tradition and a local fear, not a living conviction and a national faith.  They vote not for the Democratic party, but against the Republican party.  They want to be free from this condition; they can be free from it through the National Progressive party.