t as arduous and requires just as fibrous an imagination, if
it is gleaned from advisers.

To think of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more
difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted
intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge
seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to
know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in
terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of
a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and
inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down
on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. We have to deal
with all grades of life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men who
differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very groundwork of morals. And
we have to take into account not the simple opposition of two classes,
but the hostility of many,--the farmers and the factory workers and all
the castes within their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
organization of business. Ours is a problem in which deception has become
organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which
the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered
people. Nor can we keep to the problem within our borders. Whether we
wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds
of heaven blow through our land.

* * * * *

It is a great question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are
we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural
ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in
despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the
results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who
stand forever undecided before the complications of life, who have, as it
were, caught a glimpse of the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has
paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty, they dare not act at
all.

That is merely one of the temptations of theory. In the real world,
action and thought are so closely related that one cannot wait upon the
other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed theoretical
discussion of its method: it is a monstrous demand. There is no pausing
u