thing, and I am also far from believing that the men in whose hands this
power is concentrated deserve, on the whole, any exceptional moral
reprobation for the manner in which it has been used. In certain
respects they have served their country well, and in almost every
respect their moral or immoral standards are those of the great majority
of their fellow-countrymen. But it is none the less true that the
political corruption, the unwise economic organization, and the legal
support afforded to certain economic privileges are all under existing
conditions due to the malevolent social influence of individual and
incorporated American wealth; and it is equally true that these abuses,
and the excessive "money power" with which they are associated, have
originated in the peculiar freedom which the American tradition and
organization have granted to the individual. Up to a certain point that
freedom has been and still is beneficial. Beyond that point it is not
merely harmful; it is by way of being fatal. Efficient regulation there
must be; and it must be regulation which will strike, not at the
symptoms of the evil, but at its roots. The existing concentration of
wealth and financial power in the hands of a few irresponsible men is
the inevitable outcome of the chaotic individualism of our political and
economic organization, while at the same time it is inimical to
democracy, because it tends to erect political abuses and social
inequalities into a system. The inference which follows may be
disagreeable, but it is not to be escaped. In becoming responsible for
the subordination of the individual to the demand of a dominant and
constructive national purpose, the American state will in effect be
making itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable
distribution of wealth.

The consequences, then, of converting our American national destiny into
a national purpose are beginning to be revolutionary. When the Promise
of American life is conceived as a national ideal, whose fulfillment is
a matter of artful and laborious work, the effect thereof is
substantially to identify the national purpose with the social problem.
What the American people of the present and the future have really been
promised by our patriotic prophecies is an attempt to solve that
problem. They have been promised on American soil comfort, prosperity,
and the opportunity for self-improvement; and the lesson of the existing
crisis is that such a Pro