Now
and then an agitation for municipal reform in a particular city will
suffer a spasm of non-partisanship; but the reformers soon develop such
lively differences among themselves, that they separate into special
groups or else resume their regular party ties. Their common conception
of reform as fundamentally a moral awakening, which seeks to restore the
American, political and economic system to its early purity and vigor,
does not help them to unity of action or to unity in the framing of a
remedial policy. Different reformers really mean something very
different by the traditional system, from which American practice has
departed and which they propose to restore. Some of them mean thereby a
condition of spiritual excellence, which will be restored by a sort of
politico-moral revivalism and which will somehow make the results of
divine and popular election coincide. Others mean nothing more than the
rigid enforcement of existing laws. Still others mean a new legal
expression of the traditional democratic principle, framed to meet the
new political and social conditions; but the reformers who agree upon
this last conception of reform disagree radically as to what the new
legal expression should be.
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