Some recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are, more than any other factor, calculated to develop and foster an element of national unrest. Its deliberations are beyond the intelligence of many and above the interests of the majority. Its psychology is that of a divorce between capital and labor. Its rulings remind me of what transpired in England early in the nineteenth century.
Many who were not socialists are beginning to turn from the older order, imbued with the feeling that nothing could happen in the future worse for the country at large than the conditions that are being endured in the present.
A revolution arrives after a series of connected events which exhausts the patience of the public, and events are moving with intensity as well as rapidity.
DANIEL WEBSTER
You will search the pages of history in vain without finding a parallel to present conditions.
The war gave Bohemia her freedom; at the same time it licensed a bohemian poet to keep Italy stewing in her own juice, a bohemian journalist from New York to direct affairs in Moscow, and a bohemian socialist from Switzerland to rule over Russia.
Added to this a fashionable ladies’ pianist has tried his hand, or should I say fingers, in the science of unfurling the sails of Poland’s new Ship of State, while shop-keepers direct affairs in Germany and pusilanimous politicians keep the people of America in a state of tepid trepidation and flatulent turmoil. Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?
Macbeth declared he had waded in so far that returning would be as perilous as going on. Nothing will move them until they are swamped by the high tide of reaction and flung as flotsam on the rocks of a stormy opportunism.