As nothing in the universe is stationary, ruling classes have their
rise, culmination, and decline, and I conjecture that this class
attained to its acme of popularity and power, at least in America,
toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. I draw
this inference from the fact that in the next quarter resistance to
capitalistic methods began to take shape in such legislation as the
Interstate Commerce Law and the Sherman Act, and almost at the opening
of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its
mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. History may not be a very
practical study, but it teaches some useful lessons, one of which is
that nothing is accidental, and that if men move in a given direction,
they do so in obedience to an impulsion as automatic as is the impulsion
of gravitation. Therefore, if Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries
are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as
deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone. This problem has long
interested me, and I harbor no doubt not only that the equilibrium of
society is very rapidly shifting, but that Mr. Roosevelt has,
half-automatically, been stimulated by the instability about him to seek
for a new centre of social gravity. In plain English, I infer that he
has concluded that industrialism has induced conditions which can no
longer be controlled by the old capitalistic methods, and that the
country must be brought to a level of administrative efficiency
competent to deal with the strains and stresses of the twentieth
century, just as, a hundred and twenty-five years ago, the country was
brought to an administrative level competent for that age, by the
adoption of the Constitution. Acting on these premises, as I conjecture,
whether consciously worked out or not, Mr. Roosevelt's next step was to
begin the readjustment; but, I infer, that on attempting any correlated
measures of reform, Mr. Roosevelt found progress impossible, because of
the obstruction of the courts. Hence his instinct led him to try to