and placed in power leaders educated in social science, who have now come into touch with the intellectual leaders of the United Kingdom, with the sociologists, economists, and social scientists.  The surprising and encouraging result of such association is the announcement that the new Labour Party is today publicly thrown open to all workers, both by hand and by brain, with the object of securing for these the full fruits of their industry.  This means the inclusion of physicians, professors, writers, architects, engineers, and inventors, of lawyers who no longer regard their profession as a bulwark of the status quo; of clerks, of administrators of the type evolved by the war, who indeed have gained their skill under the old order but who now in a social spirit are dedicating their gifts to the common weal, organizing and directing vast enterprises for their governments.  In short, all useful citizens who make worthy contributions—­as distinguished from parasites, profiteers, and drones, are invited to be members; there is no class distinction here.  The fortunes of such a party are, of course, dependent upon the military success of the allied armies and navies.  But it has defined the kind of democracy the Allies are fighting for, and thus has brought about an unqualified endorsement of the war by those elements of the population which hitherto have felt the issue to be imperialistic and vague rather than democratic and clear cut.  President Wilson’s international program is approved of and elaborated.

The Report on Reconstruction of the new British Labour Party is perhaps the most important political document presented to the world since the Declaration of Independence.  And like the Declaration, it is written in the pure English that alone gives the high emotional quality of sincerity.  The phrases in which it tersely describes its objects are admirable.  “What is to be reconstructed after the war is over is not this or that government department, this or that piece of social machinery, but Society itself.”  There is to be a systematic approach towards a “healthy equality of material circumstance for every person born into the world, and not an enforced dominion over subject nations, subject colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex.”  In industry as well as in government the social order is to be based “on that equal freedom, that general consciousness of consent, and that widest participation in power, both economic and political, which is characteristic of democracy.”  But all this, it should be noted, is not to be achieved in a year or two of “feverish reconstruction”; “each brick that the Labour Party helps to lay shall go to erect the structure it intends and no other.”

In considering the main features of this program, one must have in mind whether these are a logical projection and continuation of the Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition, or whether they constitute an absolute break with that tradition.  The only valid reason for the adoption of such a program in America would be, of course, the restoration of some such equality of opportunity and economic freedom as existed in our Republic before we became an industrial nation.  “The first condition of democracy,”—­to quote again from the program, “is effective personal freedom.”