order that insured a large measure of democracy in the early days of the Republic is inadequate to meet modern industrial conditions.  Higher wages, material prosperity alone will not suffice to satisfy aspirations for a fuller self-realization, once the method by which these aspirations can be gained is glimpsed.  For it cannot be too often repeated that the unquenchable conflicts are those waged for ideas and not dollars.  These are tinged with religious emotion.

IV

Mr. Wilson’s messages to the American people and to the world have proclaimed a new international order, a League of Democracies.  And in a recent letter to New Jersey Democrats we find him warning his party, or more properly the nation, of the domestic social changes necessarily flowing from his international program.  While rightly resolved to prosecute the war on the battle lines to the utmost limit of American resources, he points out that the true significance of the conflict lies in “revolutionary change.”  “Economic and social forces,” he says, “are being released upon the world, whose effect no political seer dare to conjecture.”  And we “must search our hearts through and through and make them ready for the birth of a new day—­a day we hope and believe of greater opportunity and greater prosperity for the average mass of struggling men and women.”  He recognizes that the next great step in the development of democracy which the war must bring about—­is the emancipation of labour; to use his own phrase, the redemption of masses of men and women from “economic serfdom.”  “The old party slogans,” he declares, “will mean nothing to the future.”

Judging from this announcement, the President seems prepared to condemn boldly all the rotten timbers of the social structure that have outlived their usefulness—­a position that hitherto no responsible politician has dared to take.  Politicians, on the contrary, have revered the dead wood, have sought to shore the old timbers for their own purposes.  But so far as any party is concerned, Mr. Wilson stands alone.  Both of the two great parties, the Republican and the Democratic, in order to make a show of keeping abreast of the times, have merely patched their platforms with the new ideas.  The Socialist Party in the United States is relatively small, is divided against itself, and has given no evidence of a leadership of broad sanity and vision.  It is fortunate we have been spared in this country the formation of a political labour party, because such a party would have been composed of manual workers alone, and hence would have tended further to develop economic class consciousness, to crystallize class antagonisms.  Today, however, neither the Republican nor the Democratic party represents the great issue of the times; the cleavage between them is wholly artificial.  The formation of a Liberal Party, with a platform avowedly based on modern social science, has become essential.