Description
The New Freedom
I
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are
discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular
fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years
ago.
We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has
broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was
twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have
changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with
our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political
formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents
taken out of a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to
a past age which men have almost forgotten. Things which used to be put
into the party platforms of ten years ago would sound antiquated if put
into a platform now. We are facing the necessity of fitting a new social
organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness
and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that
the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the
convenience or prosperity of the average man. The life of the nation has
grown infinitely varied. It does not centre now upon questions of
governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It
centres upon questions of the very structure and operation of society
itself, of which government is only the instrument. Our development has
run so fast and so far along the lines sketched in the earlier day of
constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has
piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has
elaborated within the