ABSTRACT
The first and most natural task that confronts a student of any move-ment of social change is to locate the cause of the movement in a specific condition of discontent. In most instances the solution of this problem presents no difficulties at all—in fact, the advocate of social change himself devotes a great part of his energy to articulating this cause. When we examine agitation, however we face an entirely dif-ferent situation. That the agitator wants to exploit existing discontent is obvious enough; he seems always to be addressing people who are smarting under the harshest injustice and whose patience has been strained to the breaking point. But whenever the investigator scans the texts of agitation and, on the basis of experience in studying other kinds of social movements, tries to discover what is the discontent it articulates, he is consistently disappointed.
