II. THE COURSE OF EMPIRE
1. Promise and Fulfillment
A vast gulf yawns between the inspiring promise that a handful of men and women made to the world in 1776, and the fulfillment of that promise that is embodied in twentieth century American life. The pre-war indifference to the loss of liberty; the gradual encroachments on the rights of free speech, and free assemblage and of free press; the war-time suppressions, tyrannies, and denials of justice; the subsequent activities of city, state, and national legislatures and executives in passing and enforcing laws that provided for military training in violation of conscience, the denial of freedom of belief, of thought, of speech, of press and of assemblage,—activities directed specifically to the negation of those very principles of liberty which have constituted so intimate a part of the American tradition of freedom,—form a contrast between the promise of 1776 and the twentieth century fulfillment of that promise which is brutal in its terrible intensity.
Many thoughtful Americans have been baffled by this conflict between the aims of the eighteenth century and the accomplishments of the twentieth. The facts they admit. For explanation, either they may say, "It was the war," implying that with the cessation of hostilities and the return to a peace basis, the situation has undergone a radical change; or else they blame some individual or some organization for the extinction of American liberties.
Great consequences arise from great causes. A general break-down of liberties cannot be attributed to individual caprice nor to a particular legislative or judical act.
The denial of liberty in the United States is a matter of of large import. No mayor, governor, president, legislature, court, magnate, banker, corporation or trust, and
