Mr.
Hearst? How can he be called the founder of a new national democracy
when the purpose of democracy from his point of view remains
substantially the Jeffersonian ideal of equal rights for all and special
privileges for none? If, in one respect, he has been emancipating
American democracy from the Jeffersonian bondage, he has in another
respect been tightening the bonds, because he has continued to identify
democracy with the legal constitution of a system of insurgent,
ambiguous, and indiscriminate individual rights.

The validity of such a criticism from the point of view of this book
cannot be disputed. The figure of the "Square Deal," which Mr. Roosevelt
has flourished so vigorously in public addresses, is a translation into
the American vernacular of the Jeffersonian principle of equal rights;
and in Mr. Roosevelt's dissertations upon the American ideal he has
expressly disclaimed the notion of any more positive definition of the
purpose of American democracy. Moreover, his favorite figure gives a
sinister application to his assertions that the principle of equal
rights is being violated. If the American people are not getting a
"Square Deal," it must mean that they are having the cards stacked
against them; and in that case the questions of paramount importance
are: Who are stacking the cards? And how can they be punished? These are
precisely the questions which Hearst is always asking and Hearstism is
seeking to answer. Neither has Mr. Roosevelt himself entirely escaped
the misleading effects of his own figure. He has too frequently talked
as if his opponents deserved to be treated as dishonest sharpers; and he
has sometimes behaved as if his suspicions of unfair play on their part
were injuring the coolness of his judgment. But at bottom and in the
long run Mr. Roosevelt is too fair-minded a man and too patriotic a
citizen to become much the victim of his dangerous figure of the "Square
Deal." He inculcates for the most part in his political sermons a
spirit, not of suspicion and hatred, but of mutual forbearance and
confidence; and his programme of reform attaches more importance to a
revision of the rules of the game than to the treatment of the winners
under the old rules as one would treat a dishonest gambler.

In truth, Mr. Roosevelt has been building either better than he knows or
better than he cares to admit. The real meaning of his programme is more
novel and more radical than he himself has publicly