Perhaps nowhere in the world and at no time in history has this conflict taken on a more definite or acute form than it has recently in this country.

So intense is the campaign of the smaller interests, and it is being fought along such broad lines that it often seems to be directed against capitalism itself.

The masses of the people, even of the working classes, in America and Great Britain have yet no conception of the real war against capitalism, as carried on by the Socialists of Continental Europe, and it seems to them that this new small capitalist radicalism amounts practically to the same thing.
The "Insurgents," it is true, differ fundamentally from the Populists of ten and twenty years ago, in so far they understand fully that in many fields competition cannot be restored, that the large corporations cannot be dissolved into small ones and must be regulated or owned by the government, because they have deserted the Jeffersonian maxim that "that government is best that governs least." "With the growing complexity of our social and business relations," says _La Follette's Weekly_, "a great extension of governmental functions has been necessary.

The authority of State and nation reaches out in numberless and hitherto unknown forms affecting and regulating our daily lives, our occupations, our earning power, and our cost of living.

The need for this intervention, for collective action by the people through their duly constituted government, to preserve and promote their own welfare, is a need that is growing more and more important and imperative to meet the rapidly growing power of commerce, industry and finance, centralized and organized in the hands of a few men." This is nothing more nor less than the creed of capitalist collectivism.
The analysis of the present political situation of the Insurgents is not only collectivist, but, in a sense, revolutionary.