is no dissent. "It is to the committee rooms and the floors of the legislatures," President Butler declares, "that private interests go for help or protection. There responsibility is so divided, there secrecy is so easy, that measures demanded by the people are done to death, despite the urging of national and state executives. As matters stand to-day, states and syndicates have senators, districts and local interests have representatives, but the whole people of the United States have only the President to speak for them, and to do their will." Secretary Taft is again the mildest. All he will say is, "I do not mean to deny that at times private and special interests do, in fact, exercise an influence to the extent of defeating needed legislation." But he agrees with the others that the chief reason for this, as for the general failure of the legislatures to be rightly representative, lies in the control which particular states and other electoral districts exercise over members. "Particularism" is, I suppose, our only word for this phenomenon. Professor Reinsch lays much stress upon it, but President Hadley has given it the most attention and goes at the greatest length into the analysis of it and the setting forth of its consequences.

The upshot of his analysis is that, with comparatively rare exceptions, the old theory that every legislator represents the whole country or the whole state, as the case may be, is practically abandoned. The theory now would seem to be that it is enough if each merely looks after the interests of his own district. Nowhere in the legislatures is there clearly placed any responsibility for the welfare of the entire body politic, and nowhere (since we have not the English device of a responsible cabinet) is the responsibility clearly placed for the entire body of legislation enacted by a particular congress or general assembly of a state.

By two steps, President Hadley reaches the practical outcome. "If a man is chosen president to govern the country

as a whole, and if a number of men are sent to Congress to see that the country is not governed as a whole, but with a view to the interests of the separate parts, there is a perpetual threat of a deadlock." That means, according to the writer's conviction, which is not, however, fully announced in this book, -the failure of representative government. The second step is logical, if surprising. "But the country must be governed, and somebody must be found to do it. The President may not do it. That stands in the Constitution. Congress may not. That also stands in the Constitution. The only man left to do it under present conditions is the party boss. If a man gets the power to control nominations both for the executive and the legislature, he can furnish government of the kind he wants, either good or bad."

Here, no doubt, is an instance of the academical too great "certainty and severity" of reasoning about affairs. An overstrained major premise is made to yield an inference at once too broad and too precise. In practice, the instinct of compromise is far too strong, and compromise too potent a resource, to permit of anything like a constant and complete deadlock between legislature and executive. Both yield much, and together they so often contrive, without other help, to carry on the government, that the boss is neither omnipresent nor, when he exists, omnipotent. Nevertheless, one does recognize the physiognomy thus so candidly traced as a kind of composite portrait of representative government in America.

We shall not easily agree upon any statement of the extent of the evil. Sincere men will vary all the way from Secretary Taft's mere acknowledgment that there is something the matter to the journalese of Mr. Lincoln Steffens, — "government of the people, by the rascals, for the rich." But the evil stands confessed, proved, explained, and few of us would deny that it is of great enough proportions to make us all ashamed.

Naturally, it is the socialist of our group who is disposed to make the most of it. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine how he could make any more of it than he does. "The process culminated," he tells us, "at the beginning of the present decade, when 'big business' was in practically undisputed possession of both the major parties, of Congress and the Presidency, and of the governments in every town, city, and state in America."

I think that we should not take Mr. Sinclair as a fair representative of the socialist thought of our time. Certainly, he does not appear to good advantage in comparison with the writers with whom I am here associating him. When we turn from almost any one of them to him, his rhetoric seems cheap, and much of his reasoning irritatingly ad captandum. Irritating also is his loose, irresponsible handling of matters of fact, his positive assertion of things quite incapable of proof, as when he states that Roosevelt got a second term in 1904 only by the death of Senator Hanna, - and such outbursts of undisciplined feeling as his heaping of rather vulgar epithets upon the German Emperor. But his book may perhaps serve at least to indicate the socialistic view of the most recent phases of our political and economic life.

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are the outcome, and the perfectly logical outcome, of the régime of competition, under which a few private individuals have at last gained possession of all the means of production. The subversion of government is but one phase of the racking and squeezing which society must continue to endure so long as capital, omnipotent, shall continue to demand profits.

This, of course, is not new. Nor is there anything new in his remedy - the extinction of private ownership of capital and the taking over by the community of all the machinery and other appliances

of industry. Nor yet does it seem a new thing to be told that we are come to a crisis, and that the "revolution" is at hand. It provokes a kind of smile, indeed, to remember how many times society has been told that it was passing through a "transitional stage," how constantly "the present crisis" has been discovered. And not by socialists only; it would almost seem that men cannot write earnestly, with feeling, about society, without discovering a crisis. But Mr. Sinclair contrives to give some novelty to his contention. One of his chief devices is a curious parallel between the present "present crisis" and that other crisis of the fifties out of which came the revolution that overthrew slavery; and his journalistic instinct is keen enough to furnish forth the parallel with incidents which make it readable. The revolution is to come within a year after the presidential election of 1912. (The author admitted that it might come this past summer the book was written in the springbut he is entitled to the credit of having clearly preferred the later date.) To Secretary Taft, as president from 1908 to 1912, President Buchanan's rôle of "the last figurehead" is assigned, while the parts of other leading actors in the earlier crisis Webster, Clay, Sumner, John Brown, and the rest-go to various living celebrities ranging in quality from former President Cleveland to Mr. Jack London. Lincoln, we may be sure, is not neglected. He will find his counterpart as an emancipator in Mr. W. R. Hearst, of the New York Journal and various other newspapers.1 Even the

1 Whose modesty, let us trust, has not led him to forbid the editors of those papers to make mention of this tribute to their owner. It is to be hoped also that, while not failing to mention with approval the volume which contains this illuminating comparison, Mr. Hearst's papers have pointed out that it is Mr. Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, not The Industrial Republic, — which, as Mr. Sinclair himself informs us, has been compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin. These are points on which, after the revolution, school children ought not to be misled.

method and process of the revolution are quite frankly revealed; Mr. Sinclair is not a secret conspirator, but, as he announces in his preface, "a scientist and a prophet."

If one were compelled, with no prompting of personal grievance, to choose between this and even the most conservative, the most placid view of the Republic to be found in any of these writers, it is hard to see how one could hesitate. Such hurried reasoning, so suffused with feeling, can only prevail, one would think, with minds already filled with such a wish for change as will readily father the thought of revolution. But there are quieter socialists than Mr. Sinclair, who make their way by more careful steps to revolutionary views of society; and there are men with no bent whatever towards socialism who feel much as he does about the competitive system in its present phase and its effects in our American life.

All the writers of our group, indeed, go so far as to admit that we must deal henceforth with conditions and with forces which our founders did not and could not contemplate; that our system must therefore, if it is to endure, withstand a new kind of strain, perhaps discharge new functions. "Our political "Our political system has proved successful under simple conditions," says Secretary Root. "It still remains to be seen how it will stand the strain of the vast complication of life upon which we are now entering."

Does the admission mean that we must introduce into it any new principle or principles? That Lowell was wrong, and really begged the question, when he said that the Republic will survive so long as it shall adhere to the principles of the founders? That is the drift of much writing and speaking nowadays. It is one form, apparently, of the reaction. which takes place in many minds when they find they must give over the comfortable assumption that all the great constitutional questions are settled, that no problem of free government can prove really troublesome to people who have

already attained civil and religious liberty, the ballot, the public school.

It is not, however, the view of Secretary Root, who of all the conservatives of our group makes the most systematic attempt at a forecast of the future. On the contrary, he is clear that we shall need no new principles whatever, but only "the adaptation of the same old principles of law with which our fathers were familiar." True, the Secretary confesses that he regards optimism as the plain duty of every citizen and pessimism as "criminal weakness;” but his quiet recital of what he considers favorable signs for the future of free government in America is quite without the objectionable quality one finds in Mr. Sinclair's prophesying.

Secretary Root looks to tendency, rather than achievement; and he is hopeful, not because he finds our public life as it should be, but because he does find it undeniably lamentable as are some of its aspects-measurably better than it has been. He enumerates our gains. We have vastly improved our civil service; the several extensions of the merit system have deprived the spoilsmen, the office-brokers, of the greater part of their stock-in-trade. We have won for both life and property far greater security than they had at the time of our beginnings. We manage our benevolent institutions better and better. We have raised the standard for nearly all elective officials; an Aaron Burr, for instance, could hardly be chosen nowadays to the vice-presidency. We have been so far successful in the long fight against corruption that the scandals of President Grant's time- the Credit Mobilier fraud, the peculations of Belknap, Secretary of War, the Whiskey Ring, the Tweed Ring, -have to-day no counterparts. We have gradually developed a public opinion which would utterly condemn practices that were quite common a century ago, such as the use of lotteries to secure money for seminaries of learning. We have begun to mulet railroads for granting rebates to favored shippers, and to prosecute great capital

ists for manipulating railroad and other corporations to their own interests, offenses which long went unpunished. We have similarly begun to take account of the thefts of our public lands. We have done much, by the Australian ballot and other measures of reform, to prevent corrupt practices at elections.

These gains are real and substantial; this there is no denying. But are they enough? Are they enough to offset the positive reasons for discontent enumerated by Mr. Sinclair and by abler writers ? Are they enough, if we adhere to Secretary Root's own point of view, and consider only tendency, direction, to offset such a list as might be made of the respects in which we have lost rather than gained?

For we must observe that Mr. Root says nothing of that. He does not strike a balance, or show us the other side of the picture. Yet he would hardly deny that something discouraging may be said on this very point of tendency, of direction, which he emphasizes. Socialists may be wrong when they tell us the poor have been growing poorer, but they are not wrong when they tell us that the rich are growing richer. Neither are those writers wrong, on the other hand, who point out that the new organization of industry into prodigious trusts, real as may be its economies, tends to stifle the enterprise of individuals and to deprive us altogether of a certain noble and loving quality in work, as precious to the workman as it is invaluable and inimitable in his product. Nor are they entirely wrong who find in the labor unions a well-nigh equal tendency to destroy the premium which an elder régime put upon the industry and the competence of the individual laborer. Nor yet are they wrong who hold that these tendencies away from excellence in industry work their way also into the life of the state.

It is a question of gains and losses, therefore, not of gains alone. We cannot reckon upon any saving inertia in the Republic which will always incline it

towards justice and righteousness, save as the wicked and selfish among us may divert it to their evil ends. On the contrary, the labor of reform keeps still its Sisyphean character; the stone that patriots toil so hard to roll upward will always, once they remove their shoulders, slip back down hill again.

Perhaps we have not yet, we Americans, fully considered how long humanity has been at this endless task; how many shoulders have been at the stone; how many times it has gone painfully upward; how many times, how suddenly, over what anguish and despair and shame, it has rolled downward. Were we always to keep in mind the entire past of representative government and of democracy, we should often, I doubt not, tremble at the thought of the vastness of our audacity. We should wish, perhaps, that we had willed to try our experiment on a smaller scale; that we had waved back the millions of Europe's baffled and beaten who have thronged across the Atlantic to our shores; that the other millions left behind would not still look to us so wistfully, as though we were condemned to bear the burden of the whole world's hope in democracy.

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This might well be one's mood as one considered it all, but not if one considered it at sea.

How inevitably, if one thinks long of the state, the old figure of the ship recurs! And how surely, if in thought or in fact one looks out upon the ocean, and forward to the prow, rising and falling, and backward to the vessel's foaming wake, and upward to the bridge, one's mood grows firmer, more heroical! How surely, also, when one is at sea, do human affairs, with all their bewildering intricacy, sink away into that right perspective which permits the mind to dwell resolvedly upon the elementary, the elemental things! There, no willful optimism can blot out the dreary vision of human selfishness, as tireless and hungry as the waves; of human folly, as restless and as inconsequent; of human misery, as widespread and as ceaseless. But

LET us undertake at once to define the musical scope of self-playing instruments, since that will be helpful in defining the realm of their educational usefulness. Whatever rosy presentation of their powers may be made by the enthusiastic salesman, we should not permit ourselves to believe that they are a substitute for a gifted interpreter, nor that they can, in matters of expression, duplicate the renderings which a soulful amateur can attain. There may be an exception to this statement in the case of one modern and very expensive foreign product. But this instrument, the Welte-Mignon, — depending for its records upon the individual performer, can be shown to be less valuable for educational purposes than its more mechanical rivals. As to other automatic instruments, even the most perfect hitherto devised cannot, at will, select from any point in the gamut tones to be emphasized. It cannot, in a word, produce variations in tone-quality for the several tones sounding at the same instant. This single fact is sufficient to establish the inadequacy of the instrument to reproduce completely the efforts of ten or twenty fingers governed by one or two brains.

One might suppose that a recognition of this fact would immediately relegate automatic instruments to the limbo of the artistically unimportant. Such is, however, far from being the case. If we would shape our views correctly on this point,

we ought to try to trace the evolution of the average musical intelligence, -or, indeed, the evolution of that musical intelligence which comes finally to embrace, after years of careful observation and training, the whole realm of musical art. And, lest we find ourselves forced to deal in musical technicalities, we may turn to literary art and consider similar developments in that field. In following this analogy we ask merely that music be regarded as a language of some sort. What music treats of, we need not attempt to define; that is one of the problems which interest metaphysicians and æstheticians, and we may allow them still to find it a baffling problem. But we must accept the statement that music is a language. We ought further to be willing to accept the statement that it is a definite language, - not as giving definite information on any subject, but as conveying a definite message from the mind or soul of the composer, through the interpreter, to the hearer. This must be true, since, after listening to a great musical work, the hearer is satisfied. He has been attentive for a time to an utterance in tone, and, at the conclusion of that utterance, he has received an impression which he knows to be the result of a clearly defined plan combined with a mastery of the means of communication sufficient to carry out that plan with complete success. He is satisfied with the result. He will not be able to render in words any portion of the