ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century is the epoch of liberal triumph; from Waterloo until the outbreak of the Great War no other doctrine spoke with the same authority or exercised the same widespread influence. In the United States, therefore, the political right of the President and Congress to enact liberal, much less socialist, measures is limited, as it is limited in no other country of the world, by a judicial view of the rights of property which only the haphazard exercise of the appointing power can control. The socialists rejected the liberal idea because they saw in it simply one more particular of history seeking to masquerade as a universal. They argued that it was not, in fact, a final doctrine, but a fitful and temporary phase in man's endless struggle with his environment. American capitalism, as it seems, has entered upon the same phase of critical contraction as European capitalism, with results upon its liberal ideology that are similar in character.
