To attempt a partial answer to the query implies no claim to a prophetic
faculty. Whether we like to face the fact or not, far-reaching changes
in our economical theories and social conditions are imminent, involving
corresponding readjustments in our constitutional arrangements and
political machinery. Tennyson foreshadowed it all in his "Locksley Hall"
seventy years ago:--"The individual withers, and the world is more and
more." The day of individualism as it existed in the American ideal of
sixty years since is over; that of collectivism and possibly socialism
has opened. The day of social equality is relegated to what may be
considered a somewhat patriarchal past,--that patriarchal past having
come to a close during the memory of those still in active life.

And yet, though all this can now be studied in the political discussion
endlessly dragging on, strangely and sadly enough that discussion
carries in it hardly a note of encouragement. It is, in a word,
unspeakably shallow. And here, having sufficiently for my present
purpose though in hurried manner, diagnosed the situation,--located the
seat of disturbance,--we come to the question of treatment. Involving,
as it necessarily does, problems of the fundamental law, and a
rearrangement and different allocation of the functions of government,
this challenges the closest thought of the publicist. That the problem
is here crying aloud for solution is apparent. The publications which
cumber the counters of our book-stores, those for which the greatest
popular call to-day exists--treatises relating to trade interests, to
collectivism, to socialism, even to anarchism--tell the tale in part; in
part it is elsewhere and otherwise told. Only recently, in once Puritan
Massachusetts, processions paraded the streets carrying banners marked
with this device, more suggestive than strange:--"No master and no God!"