and just because these really interesting questions could not be handled,
politics was an over-advertised hubbub. But the vision of the new
statecraft in centering politics upon human interests becomes a creator
of opportunities instead of a censor of morals, and deserves a fresh and
heightened regard.

The party platform will grow ever more and more into a program of
services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast
of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive
out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that
belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older
view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but
grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will
jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are
simply the reiterations of men who do not understand the uses of the
state.

A political revolution is in progress: the state as policeman is giving
place to the state as producer.

CHAPTER IX

REVOLUTION AND CULTURE

There is a legend of a peasant who lived near Paris through the whole
Napoleonic era without ever having heard of the name of Bonaparte. A
story of that kind is enough to make a man hesitate before he indulges in
a flamboyant description of social changes. That peasant is more than a
symbol of the privacy of human interest: he is a warning against the
incurable romanticism which clings about the idea of a revolution.
Popular history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for
coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into
a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an
episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy
to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked
while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was
being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people to
believe that they too are in the midst of great transformations. What
looks to us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards a great
historical crisis was to our ancestors little else than the occasional
punctuation of daily life with an exciting incident. Even to-day when we
have begun to speak of our age as a transition, there are millions of
people who live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of us who regard
ourselves as active in