do not advocate the communism of the Russian soviets. But would their more moderate régime of state socialism be free from the evils of political manipulation, economic coercion, and social rebellion? Would the aspirants for political power be less likely to bargain for support in a state which had at its disposal such unlimited economic favors? Would the workers be more willing to accept the assignments and rewards of labor dictated by an all-powerful state than they are to accept the terms which they arrange by collective bargaining with private employers? These are questions which are naturally answered both ways in the absence of the actual experiment of socialism. But the American people as a whole have not yet shown any great inclination to answer them in the affirmative. The Socialist vote is perhaps as much a protest against the evils inherent in our present system of economics as an indorsement of the political remedies offered for them in the Socialist platform. Undoubtedly many vote for the Socialist candidate as a rebuke to the great parties who would not vote for him if they thought that he had a chance of being elected.

Finally, the early years of the new century saw the rise of a radical movement in the field of labor which regarded the attempt of the Socialists to get possession of the government by the slow and orderly process of the ballot as scornfully as the Socialists themselves regarded the bourgeois reforms. At a secret conference held at Chicago in January, 1905, a group of the more radical Socialists and officials of the labor unions outside the American Federation organized the Industrial Workers of the World (the I. W. W.). Their manifesto declared that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common; between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world, organized as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system." They condemned the trade unions as "craft divisions which hinder the growth of the class consciousness of the workers and foster the idea of harmony of interests between the employing exploiter and the employed slave." Their program was "one great industrial union . . . founded on the class struggle and

conducted in harmony with the recognition of the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class." Their method was "direct action"-the bomb, the mass strike, sabotage,1 the incitement to violence by inflammatory appeals to the workers; in short, "energetic, implacable, revolutionary, and international action." The I. W. W. was an extension of European syndicalism to this country. It attracted chiefly the unskilled, foreign-born laborers. It first came into wide public notice through the indictment of three of the officials of the Western Federation of Miners for the murder of ex-Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho on December 30, 1905, and the trial two years later of the secretary-treasurer of the Federation, William D. Haywood, at Boise. Haywood was acquitted; and Moyer and Pettibone, who had been arrested with him and sent from Colorado to Idaho for trial, were discharged. President Roosevelt condemned these men as "undesirable citizens."

It was a far different country that Mr. Taft was called to govern on March 4, 1909, from the country which Theodore Roosevelt found at the beginning of the century. It was America awakened, seething with social unrest. A general house-cleaning was in progress. The writers of the "literature of exposure" seemed almost to gloat over our shameful untidiness and squalor. The voices of reformers were crying "Lo!" here and "Lo!" there. The advocates of change were proposing a score of plans for our political and social redemption. "In no period after the Civil War," says Professor Ogg, "was the American system of government more clearly on trial than in the opening decade of the present century." "Shall the people rule? is the overshadowing issue which manifests itself in all the questions now under discussion," said the Democratic platform of 1908. Apparently, then, the people were not ruling. On this point bourgeois tinkerer, socialist reconstructionist, and I. W. W. revolutiohist were agreed. The projects of reform were being tested in state and municipal government. Presumably the battle would be carried into the halls of Congress.

1"Sabotage" is a word derived from the French sabot, or peasant's wooden shoe, thrown into the machinery like a monkey wrench.

PRESIDENT TAFT AND THE INSURGENTS

It is on the background of the stimulated social and political consciousness described in the preceding section that the administration of Mr. Taft must be judged. The new President was not a reactionary, as many of his critics have called him; indeed, as compared with Cleveland or McKinley, he seems almost a radical. An imposing list could be drawn up of the progressive measures of his term, both in the way of the continuation of the Roosevelt policies (the prosecution of the trusts, the regulation of the railroads, the extension of the civil service, the encouragement of arbitration, the enlargement of the conservation program) and in the way of new legislation establishing postal-savings banks, the parcel post, a commerce court, an expert tariff board, civil government for Alaska, a new cabinet department of labor, taxation of the profits of corporations, and constitutional amendments providing for a graduated income tax and the direct election of senators. Some of these measures were the fulfillment of the demands of the Populists twenty years earlier. Mr. Taft moved forward; but as he did not move so fast as public opinion, he seemed to be moving backward-an illusion which the passenger will get from looking out of a car window at a train by the side of his own going more rapidly in the same direction. This elementary axiom of the "theory of relativity" must be recognized in order to do justice to the administration.

Few presidents in our history have had better training for their high office than Taft. Ever since he had been called by McKinley from a Federal circuit judgeship in Ohio to head the second Philippine Commission (1900), he had been an intimate and influential factor in the counsels of the government. He was an administrator of rare capacity, a lawyer of great distinction, a man of contagious courtesy, open, sympathetic, buoyant, and conciliatory. The task that he had inherited was a doubly difficult one. In the first place, the time of reckoning of the American people with their government had come. The President was called upon to act as an "honest

broker" between old customs and new ideals. In the second place, any man who came after Roosevelt would have had to echo Jefferson's response to Vergennes, on being received at Paris on the departure of Franklin: "Sir, I succeed him; nobody could replace him." Taf: was pledged to carry out Roosevelt's policies, but he could not continue his methods. Temperament and training alike made it impossible for him to maintain that constant, vivid, and variegated appeal to the people which Roosevelt's inexhaustible energy prompted. Roosevelt was always "starting things." The men west of the Missouri River thought that if a week passed "without Teddy's starting something," he must be sick. He rode through his administration on a charger, with Henry of Navarre's white plume waving on his helmet. Taft walked, deliberately and slowly. For Roosevelt the law, which he had never studied, was a convenience, an instrument to be shaped by executive action for the welfare of the people. But Taft was a legalist through and through. A succession of purely executive offices from civil-service commissioner to president had confirmed Roosevelt in the executive habit of authority in counsel and finality in decision; whereas, long years on the bench had bred in Taft the judicial mind which ponders evidence, fearing the danger of a mistaken decision more than the delay of a suspended judgment. It is significant that every man whom Taft called into his cabinet (except the two members taken over from the Roosevelt administration) was a lawyer.1

There were signs of the approaching storm before Roosevelt left office. The tension between the executive and Congress and

1 Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania resigned his seat in the Senate to accept the Secretaryship of State; Franklin McVeagh of Illinois and Jacob M. Dickinson of Tennessee (both former Cleveland Democrats) were put at the head of the Treasury and War Departments respectively. George W. Wickersham of New York was made Attorney-General; F. H. Hitchcock of Washington (D. C.), Postmaster-General; Charles Nagel of Missouri, Secretary of Commerce and Labor; Richard A. Ballinger of Washington, Secretary of the Interior. The veteran Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, was retained for a fourth term, and George von L. Meyer of Massachusetts was transferred from the PostmasterGeneralship to the Navy Department.

between the liberal and conservative elements in Congress was increasingly visible. After the election of 1908 had removed Roosevelt, the ultraconservatives, like Aldrich and Hale in the Senate and Tawney and Dalzell in the House, raised their heads. The comment was current during the short session of the closing Congress of Roosevelt's term that the President was not holding his own against these men in his struggle for progressive legislation. Meanwhile in Congress itself protests were being raised against the domination of the Senate by Aldrich and of the House by Speaker Cannon. The conservatives were determined that the tide of "direct government" which was rising so fast in the state legislatures should be stayed at the doors of Congress. Bills of popular import were allowed to slumber in committees while the Speaker gave precedence to measures that had the support of powerful lobbies. Congressman Shackleford of Missouri attacked the whole arbitrary censorship of legislation in a vitriolic speech in 1908, in which he claimed the right of the House to act "as the chosen representatives of a free people in what is supposed to be a representative government." "Take your hands off the committees, Mr. Speaker," he cried, "and let them act; or if they will not act then recognize me or some other member to move to discharge them from further consideration and let the House act." Shackleford's speech was sent broadcast through the country, and newspapers and magazines took up the issue of parliamentary reform. Furthermore, there were protests against the effects of the Dingley tariff law. The cost of living had been rising steadily, and while wages had increased also, they had lagged far behind prices. The bulletins of the Labor Bureau showed that the per-capita cost of the necessary articles of daily consumption had risen from $74 to $107 in the first decade of the operation of the Dingley law. Manufactured goods had increased 32 per cent in price and raw materials 50 per cent, while the wages in over four thousand establishments investigated had risen only 19.1 per cent. At the same time, the profits of the great combinations in the manufacture of wool, cotton, thread, shoes, sewing-machines, farm machinery, and scores of