of one kind or another, while the more intelligent and disinterested of them are pretty sure to vote a “reform” ticket.  To stand for a programme of reform has become one of the recognized roads to popularity.  The political leaders with the largest personal followings are some kind of reformers.  They sit in presidential chairs; they occupy executive mansions; they extort legislation from unwilling politicians; they regulate and abuse the erring corporations; they are coming to control the press; and they are the most aggressive force in American public opinion.  The supporters and beneficiaries of existing abuses still control much of the official and practically all the unofficial political and business machinery; but they are less domineering and self-confident than they were.  The reformers have both scared and bewildered them.  They begin to realize that reform has come to stay, and perhaps even to conquer, while reform itself is beginning to pay the penalty of success by being threatened with deterioration.  It has had not only its hero in Theodore Roosevelt, but its specter in William R. Hearst.

In studying the course of the reforming movement during the last twenty-five years, it appears that, while reform has had a history, this history is only beginning.  Since 1880, or even 1895 or 1900, it has been transformed in many significant ways.  In the beginning it was spasmodic in its outbursts, innocent in its purposes, and narrow in its outlook.  It sprang up almost spontaneously in a number of different places and in a number of different detached movements; and its adherents did not look much beyond a victory at a particular election, or the passage of a few remedial laws.  Gradually, however, it increased in definiteness, persistence, and comprehensiveness of purpose.  The reformers found the need of permanent organization, of constant work, and even within limits, of a positive programme.  Their success and their influence upon public opinion increased just in proportion as they began to take their job seriously.  Indeed, they have become extremely self-conscious in relation to their present standing and their future responsibilities.  They are beginning to predict the most abundant results from the “uplift” movement, of which they are the leaders.  They confidently anticipate that they are destined to make a much more salient and significant contribution to the history of their country than has been made by any group of political leaders since the Civil War.

It is in a sense a misnomer to write of “Reform” as a single thing.  Reform is, as a matter of fact, all sorts of things.  The name has been applied to a number of separate political agitations, which have been started by different people at different times in different parts of the country, and these separate movements have secured very different kinds of support, and have run very different courses.  Tariff reform, for instance, was an early and popular agitation whose peculiarity has consisted in securing