emancipation of labour; to use his own phrase, the redemption of masses
of men and women from "economic serfdom." "The old party slogans," he
declares, "will mean nothing to the future."

Judging from this announcement, the President seems prepared to condemn
boldly all the rotten timbers of the social structure that have outlived
their usefulness--a position that hitherto no responsible politician has
dared to take. Politicians, on the contrary, have revered the dead wood,
have sought to shore the old timbers for their own purposes. But so far
as any party is concerned, Mr. Wilson stands alone. Both of the two
great parties, the Republican and the Democratic, in order to make a show
of keeping abreast of the times, have merely patched their platforms with
the new ideas. The Socialist Party in the United States is relatively
small, is divided against itself, and has given no evidence of a
leadership of broad sanity and vision. It is fortunate we have been
spared in this country the formation of a political labour party, because
such a party would have been composed of manual workers alone, and hence
would have tended further to develop economic class consciousness, to
crystallize class antagonisms. Today, however, neither the Republican
nor the Democratic party represents the great issue of the times; the
cleavage between them is wholly artificial. The formation of a Liberal
Party, with a platform avowedly based on modern social science, has
become essential. Such a party, to be in harmony with our traditions and
our creed, to arrest in our democracy the process of class stratification
which threatens to destroy it, must not draw its members from the ranks
of manual labour alone, but from all elements of our population. It
should contain all the liberal professions, and clerks and shopkeepers,
as well as manual workers; administrators, and even those employers who
have become convinced that our present economic system does not suffice
to meet the needs of the day. In short, membership in such a party, as