e and eternal, politics that Jefferson had said about all there
was to say, economics insisted that the struggle between labor and
capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life told them that society was
brutal: an episode like the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to
blasphemy and dynamite.

Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and terrorism, are compounded
of courage, indignation and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear from
the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but the preaching of "class
consciousness," far from being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic interests.

Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a revolutionary period and
nothing is so important as to be aware of it. The measure of our
self-consciousness will more or less determine whether we are to be the
victims or the masters of change. Without philosophy we stumble along.
The old routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway, social forces
are emerging which seek autonomy and struggle against slavery to
non-human purposes. We seem to be moving towards some such statecraft as
I have tried to suggest. But without knowledge of it that progress will
be checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for a splendid human
civilization are all about us. They need to be used. For that there must
be a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of impulses, competent
to ward off the idols of its own thought, hospitable to novelty and
sufficiently inventive to harness power.

Why this age should have come to be what it is, why at this particular
time the whole drift of thought should be from authority to autonomy
would be an interesting speculation. It is one of the ultimate questions
of politics. It is like asking why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
singled out as the luminous point of the Western World. We do not know
enough to cut under such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why there
was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries man seems extraordinarily
creative. Perhaps the Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of
change, and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to the great
surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease of travel, the popularizing of
knowledge, the break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest in
human life by showing how temporary are all its instruments. Certainly
placid or morose acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves either to
ideas or to