the voters to
trifle with taboos and by-products, to wander into blind alleys like "16
to 1," his leadership is a public calamity. The newspaper or politician
which tries to make an issue out of a supposed "prosperity" or out of
admiration for the mere successes of our ancestors is doing its best to
choke off the creative energies in politics. All the stultification of
the stand-pat mind may be described as inability, and perhaps
unwillingness, to nourish a fruitful choice of issues.

That choice is altogether too limited in America, anyway. Political
discussion, whether reactionary or radical, is monotonously confined to
very few issues. It is as if social life were prevented from irrigating
political thought. A subject like the tariff, for example, has absorbed
an amount of attention which would justify an historian in calling it the
incubus of American politics. Now the exaltation of one issue like that
is obviously out of all proportion to its significance. A contributory
factor it certainly is, but the country's destiny is not bound up finally
with its solution. The everlasting reiterations about the tariff take up
altogether too much time. To any government that was clear about values,
that saw all problems in their relation to human life, the tariff would
be an incident, a mechanical device and little else. High protectionist
and free trader alike fall under the indictment--for a tariff wall is
neither so high as heaven nor so broad as the earth. It may be necessary
to have dykes on portions of the seashore; they may be superfluous
elsewhere. But to concentrate nine-tenths of your attention on the
subject of dykes is to forget the civilization they are supposed to
protect. A wall is a wall: the presence of it will not do the work of
civilization--the absence of it does not absolve anyone from the tasks of
social life. That a statecraft might deal with the tariff as an aid to
its purposes is evident. But anyone who makes the tariff the principal
concern of statecraft is, I believe, mistaking the hedge for the house.

The tariff controversy is almost as old as the nation. A more recent one
is what Senator La Follette calls "The great issue before the American
people to-day, ... the control of their own government." It has taken the
form of an attack on corruption, on what is vaguely called "special
privilege" and of a demand for a certain amount of political machinery
such as direct primaries, the initiative, refe