Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/518

 504 tendency toward a rigid bureaucracy, with its moral perversion and industrial paralysis, has become painfully manifest. The centralization of the Federal Government, which set in so irresistibly with the civil war, has spread like a pest to the State and municipal governments, which wield an authority over the individual far in excess of the fears of the fathers. The same spirit has entered political parties and reduced them to powerful mechanisms almost military in perfection and despotism. It has seized upon the laboring man and capitalist, and arrayed them in bitter enmity and bloody conflict. It has reached the trades and professions, and developed in them the most odious traits of intolerance and monopoly. It has invaded social life even. There it has created a multitude of organizations with an exclusive and aggressive temper and a feudal love of pretension and show. When a nation falls, like another priest of Apollo, into the strangling coils of such a system of organization, every part of which is made firm and unyielding by some law in violation of right or in concession of privilege, it has reached the limit of evolution. Immobile and unprogressive, its people, grown greedy, deceitful and barbarous, lose the capacity to think or to care for themselves. The Government, also become depraved and incapable, degenerates into a huge machine to oppress and exploit. Thus a free democracy is turned into a Roman or Bourbon despotism that only a shock like an irruption of barbarians or a terrific explosion like a great revolution can awaken and rescue from the lethargy of death.

But from democracy as a condition of freedom under moral control, every achievement within the reach of human effort may be expected. Under its régime society remains fluent and mobile,