Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which we see
reigning in the determination of our public life and our public policy.
There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence. She boasted
that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular government; but now
she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are at work forces which
she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.

Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who
did not care for the nation, could put this whole country into a flame?
Don't you know that this country from one end to the other believes that
something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for some man without
conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way. Follow me!"--and lead
in paths of destruction!

The old order changeth--changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and
equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of
reconstruction.

I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very little
of it has been blind or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to say, as
if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every
age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change
than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for
change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as
in this in which we are taking part.

The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and
normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into
another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself over,
in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of