ries such as Dr. Davis has told to-night were uncommon in those
simpler days. The pressure of low wages, the agony of obscure and
unremunerated toil, did not exist in America in anything like the same
proportions that they exist now. And as our life has unfolded and
accumulated, as the contacts of it have become hot, as the populations
have assembled in the cities, and the cool spaces of the country have
been supplanted by the feverish urban areas, the whole nature of our
political questions has been altered. They have ceased to be legal
questions. They have more and more become social questions, questions
with regard to the relations of human beings to one another,--not merely
their legal relations, but their moral and spiritual relations to one
another. This has been most characteristic of American life in the last
few decades, and as these questions have assumed greater and greater
prominence, the movement which this association represents has gathered
cumulative force. So that, if anybody asks himself, "What does this
gathering force mean," if he knows anything about the history of the
country, he knows that it means something that has not only come to
stay, but has come with conquering power.

I get a little impatient sometimes about the discussion of the channels
and methods by which it is to prevail. It is going to prevail, and that
is a very superficial and ignorant view of it which attributes it to
mere social unrest. It is not merely because the women are discontented.
It is because the women have seen visions of duty, and that is something
which we not only cannot resist, but, if we be true Americans, we do not
wish to resist. America took its origin in visions of the human spirit,
in aspirations for the deepest sort of liberty of the mind and of the
heart, and as visions of that sort come up to the sight of those who are
spiritually minded in America, America comes more and more into her
birthright and into the perfection of her development.

So that what we have to realize in dealing with forces of this sort is
that we are dealing with the substance of life itself. I have felt as I
sat here to-night the wholesome contagion of the occasion. Almost every
other time that I ever visited Atlantic City, I came to fight somebody.
I hardly know how to conduct myself when I have not come to fight
against anybody, but with somebody. I have come to suggest, among other
things, that when the forces of nature are steadi