LA FOLLETTE AT HOME IN VAST AND WINDY FUTURE

"The drift away from a constitutional to an unlimited democracy of the kind that La Follette is preaching has always meant in the past the rise of class warfare, the disappearance of individual liberty, and the triumph of the principle of force", said Professor Irving Babbitt when asked by a CRIMSON reporter to comment on La Follette's attitude toward the constitution and the Supreme Court.

"Allowing Congress to pass legislation which the Supreme Court has declared to be unconstitutional", continued Professor Babbitt, "is equivalent to declaring the constitution void. La Follette represents, therefore, part of a dangerous trend in this country to discredit the judiciary, and ultimately to undermine and weaken the veto power of the constitution upon popular impulse.

"It is also true that the La Follette campaign is essentially a campaign against private property. The tendency of the whole radical movement is, in fact, to regard the cause of the underlying evils of the state as economic when they are really moral.

No Historical Perspective

"But the outstanding weakness of the present age in dealing with the political problem", according to Professor Babbitt, "is its lack of historical perspective. Few moderns are able to judge the present in the light of the past, and what we most need at this juncture in our national affairs is the power to appraise the demagoguery of the present in the light of the political past." To quote a sentence from Professor Babbitt's latest book, La Follette is a good example of "the progressive who has repudiated the past, barely tolerates the present, and is at home imaginatively only in that vast, windy abode, the future".

"For example", said Professor Babbitt, "anyone can convince himself of the startling relevancy to existing conditions of Aristotle's 'Politics', especially now that we have begun to slip our constitutional moorings and to drift towards a direct democracy. There are passages in it as modern as the morning newspaper, and at least a hundred times more sensible. Take the passage: 'Such legislation (against private property) may have a specious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states . . . which are said to arrive out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause . . . the wickedness of human nature'. Or take the following passage: 'Men should not think it is slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it is their salvation'.