national legislatures and executives in
passing and enforcing laws that provided for military training in
violation of conscience, the denial of freedom of belief, of thought, of
speech, of press and of assemblage,--activities directed specifically to
the negation of those very principles of liberty which have constituted
so intimate a part of the American tradition of freedom,--form a
contrast between the promise of 1776 and the twentieth century
fulfillment of that promise which is brutal in its terrible intensity.

Many thoughtful Americans have been baffled by this conflict between the
aims of the eighteenth century and the accomplishments of the twentieth.
The facts they admit. For explanation, either they may say, "It was the
war," implying that with the cessation of hostilities and the return to
a peace basis, the situation has undergone a radical change; or else
they blame some individual or some organization for the extinction of
American liberties.

Great consequences arise from great causes. A general break-down of
liberties cannot be attributed to individual caprice nor to a particular
legislative or judicial act.

The denial of liberty in the United States is a matter of large import.
No mayor, governor, president, legislature, court, magnate, banker,
corporation or trust, and no combination of these individuals and
organizations could arbitrarily destroy the American Republic.
Underneath personality and partisanship are working the forces which
have stripped the American people of their essential liberties as the
April sun strips the mountains of their snow.

No one can read the history of the United States since the drafting of
the Declaration of Independence without being struck by the complete
transformation in the forms of American life. The Industrial Revolution
which had gripped England for half a century, made itself felt in the
United States after 1815. Steam, transportation, industrial development,
city life, business organization, expansion across the continent--these
are the factors that have made of the United States a nation utterly
apart from the nation of which those who signed the Declaration of
Independence and fought the Revolution dreamed.

These economic changes have brought political changes. The American
Republic has been thrust aside. Above its remains towers a mighty
imperial structure,--the world of business,--bulwarked by usage and
convention; safeguarded by legislation, judi