VOLUME XX

NUMBER 6

W

E TAKE our politics sometimes too solemnly and sometimes too lightly. We become excited about personal contests, for all the world enjoys a fight whether there be any reason for it or not. But, as a rule, we move more slowly about principles. Yet we do move. We hear political orators demonstrate the early downfall of the Republic unless we adopt this principle or abandon that; for the moment we cheer them; for another moment we feel a little alarm and resolve to set the matter right; but, before bedtime, we are running in our accustomed grooves of thought, and we don't really believe that the day of doom is near. We are a happy, perhaps a happy-go-lucky, people. Still we have an underlying seriousness.

Characteristically one of the most important political events of the late summer we hardly noticed the definite declaration by Mr. Bryan that he will not be a candidate for the Presidency in 1912. This, if he and his friends live up to it, gives more hope for the Democrats than the blunders and the crimes of their enemies have given. It will even greatly help the party at next month's election.

And political changes or promises and threats of changes - are coming fast. It will be a new political world with Mr. Cannon shorn of power; with Mr. Aldrich in retirement; with President Taft gaining steadily in public esteem;

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with Mr. Roosevelt again active; with Governor Harmon likely to be reëlected in Ohio; with Mayor Gaynor now become a national figure and a commanding one; probably with a Democratic House in the next Congress, and surely a House with a majority opposed to the "Standpat" Republicans; with the tariff become a moral issue alike in Mr. Taft's, Mr. Roosevelt's, and the Insurgents' and the Democrats' vocabulary - these are changes, come and coming, that make the game much more interesting than it has been for a long time.

Behind all these changes is the one force, the one resolve, the one set purpose of the people, which they will slowly work out through one party or the other, through one set of public servants or another the resolve to make the great. corporations recognize the rights of the public and to have only their proper share in political and legislative activity.

There is a moral gain in this direction at every turn of public opinion, and such. progress has already been made as to bring the public mind into a mood to look long-neglected facts in the face--such facts as these: the ever-mounting cost of government; the long-standing corporation-interference with legislation; the pension-roll that grows faster the farther we get away from the Civil War. These things the people are becoming earnest about, and more earnest with every political campaign.

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