for none, and of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Having in this way proved their fundamental political orthodoxy, they proceed to interpret the phrases according to their personal, class, local, and partisan preconceptions and interests.  They have never stopped to inquire whether the principle of equal rights in its actual embodiment in American institutional and political practice has not been partly responsible for some of the existing abuses, whether it is either a safe or sufficient platform for a reforming movement, and whether its continued proclamation as the fundamental political principle of a democracy will help or hinder the higher democratic consummation.  Their unquestioning orthodoxy in this respect has made them faithless both to their own personal interest as reformers and to the cause of reform.  Reform exclusively as a moral protest and awakening is condemned to sterility.  Reformers exclusively as moral protestants and purifiers are condemned to misdirected effort, to an illiberal puritanism, and to personal self-stultification.  Reform must necessarily mean an intellectual as well as a moral challenge; and its higher purposes will never be accomplished unless it is accompanied by a masterful and jubilant intellectual awakening.

All Americans, whether they are professional politicians or reformer, “predatory” millionaires or common people, political philosophers or schoolboys, accept the principle of “equal rights for all and special privileges for none” as the absolutely sufficient rule of an American democratic political system.  The platforms of both parties testify on its behalf.  Corporation lawyers and their clients appear frequently to believe in it.  Tammany offers tribute to it during every local political campaign in New York.  A Democratic Senator, in the intervals between his votes for increased duties on the products of his state, declares it to be the summary of all political wisdom.  The fact that Mr. Bryan incorporates it in most of his speeches does not prevent Mr. Hearst from keeping it standing in type for the purpose of showing how very American the American can be.  The fact that Mr. Hearst has appropriated it with the American flag as belonging peculiarly to himself has not prevented Mr. Roosevelt from explaining the whole of his policy of reform as at the bottom an attempt to restore a “Square Deal”—­that is, a condition of equal rights and non-existing privileges.  More radical reformers find the same principle equally useful for their own purposes.  Mr. Frederic C. Howe, in his “Hope of Democracy,” bases an elaborate scheme of municipal socialism exclusively upon it.  Mr. William Smythe, in his “Constructive Democracy,” finds warrant in the same principle for the immediate purchase by the central government of the railway and “trust” franchises.  Mr. Henry George, Jr., in his “Menace of Privilege,” asserts that the plain American citizen can never enjoy equality of rights as long as land, mines, railroad rights of way and terminals, and the like remain in the hands of private owners.  The collectivist socialists are no less certain that the institution of private property necessarily gives some men an unjust advantage over others.  There is no extreme of radicalism or conservatism, of individualism or socialism, of Republicanism or Democracy, which does not rest its argument on this one consummate principle.