with the genius of the land, which asks for action and is impatient of
words,--Congress has become an institution which does its work in the
privacy of committee rooms and not on the floor of the Chamber; a body
that makes laws,--a legislature; not a body that debates,--not a
parliament. Party conventions afford little or no opportunity for
discussion; platforms are privately manufactured and adopted with a whoop.
It is partly because citizens have foregone the taking of counsel
together that the unholy alliances of bosses and Big Business have been
able to assume to govern for us.

I conceive it to be one of the needs of the hour to restore the processes
of common counsel, and to substitute them for the processes of private
arrangement which now determine the policies of cities, states, and
nation. We must learn, we freemen, to meet, as our fathers did, somehow,
somewhere, for consultation. There must be discussion and debate, in which
all freely participate.

It must be candid debate, and it must have for its honest purpose the
clearing up of questions and the establishing of the truth. Too much
political discussion is not to honest purpose, but only for the
confounding of an opponent. I am often reminded, when political debate
gets warm and we begin to hope that the truth is making inroads on the
reason of those who have denied it, of the way a debate in Virginia once
seemed likely to end:

When I was a young man studying at Charlottesville, there were two
factions in the Democratic party in the State of Virginia which were
having a pretty hot contest with each other. In one of the counties one of
these factions had practically no following at all. A man named Massey,
one of its redoubtable debaters, though a little, slim,