No amount of moral energy,
directed merely towards the enforcement of the laws, can possibly avail
to accomplish any genuine or lasting reform. It is the laws themselves
which are partly at fault, and still more at fault is the group of ideas
and traditional practices behind the laws.
Reformers have failed for the most part to reach a correct diagnosis of
existing political and economic abuses, because they are almost as much
the victim of perverted, confused, and routine habits of political
thought as is the ordinary politician. They have eschewed the tradition
of partisan conformity in reference to controverted political questions,
but they have not eschewed a still more insidious tradition of
conformity--the tradition that a patriotic American citizen must not in
his political thinking go beyond the formulas consecrated in the sacred
American writings. They adhere to the stupefying rule that the good
Fathers of the Republic relieved their children from the necessity of
vigorous, independent, or consistent thinking in political
matters,--that it is the duty of their loyal children to repeat the
sacred words and then await a miraculous consummation of individual and
social prosperity.
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