Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/106

 *trayal, even though they had been led to the charge by Phocion and Demosthenes.

I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name, had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the working men had learned at last that the system did not "protect" them, and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men so far as I know—M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough to disgust anyone with