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And the great Americans of the past have nearly all been conservative-liberals. Washington was a great republican; he was also essentially an aristocrat in social and economic relations, who kept slaves and did not believe in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically, was the greatest of English-speaking democrats, but he let the privileged classes exploit the working-man and the soldier, partly in order to win the war, chiefly because problems of wages and unearned increments and economic privilege generally did not enter into his scheme of democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for the square deal in public and private life, but hesitated and at last turned back when it became evident that a deal that was completely square meant the overturning of social life as he knew and loved it in America.

And these men we feel were right. Their duty was to make possible a good government and a stable society, and they worked not with theories only, but also with facts as they were. The Germans have argued that the first duty of the state is self-preservation, and that rights of individual men and other states may properly be crushed in order to preserve it. We have crushed the Germans and, one hopes, their philosophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of society to preserve itself. No one believes that universal suffrage for all, negroes included, would have been advisable in Washington’s day, when republicanism was still an experiment. No one believes, I fancy, that the minimum wage, the inheritance tax, and coöperative management should have had first place, or indeed any place, in the mind of the Lincoln of 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a socialist would have been as useful to the United States as Roosevelt the Progressive with a back-throw toward the ideals of the aristocratic state; as Roosevelt the conservative-liberal.