IF anyone had told Senator Moses a few years ago that the day would come when devout ladies would be praying for the success of his candidate, he would not have believed it possible. The Republican Party, or at least that wing of it to which Senator Moses belongs, has since the days of Mark Hanna done very well indeed by itself in this world but it has not been able to feel that it was as righteous as it was rich. For over a generation the position has been that the Republicans were saving business anti the Democrats were saving their souls, and even when the Republicans had the votes, the Democrats had their consciences. Mr. Bryan was always more moral, if less successful, than his opponents. Even Colonel Roosevelt, when he wanted to battle for the Lord at Armageddon, had to bolt the Republican Party. Mr. Wilson was obviously on the side of the angels. But here in one gigantic political convulsion the Republican Party was lifted to undreamed of heights of glory. For once it was possible to serve both God and Mammon by voting for the G.O.P.

IT might be said. I suppose, that for the first L time in a generation capitalism and the ion-conformist conscience found themselves aligned against a common adversary. Hitherto hey have represented opposing forces in American public life. The old battle cries of politics about "human rights" and "property rights", "the trusts", and "the people" indicate he suspicion with which in years gone by hose who directed corporate business were divided from those who felt that they inspired and instructed the American conscience. What happened this year is disclosed by the fact hat the campaign against Governor Smith was conducted with equal fervour by persons who normally have so little in common as Mr. Hughes and Mr. Borah, Mr. Mellon and Mr. William Allen White, Mr. Ogden Mills and Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Men like Mr. Hughes and Mr. Mellon represent he orthodox Republican tradition, that is to say the conviction that the policies desired by big business are the soundest national policies. Ur. Borah and Mr. White, on the other hand, represent the traditional protest against this belief, that agrarian, provincial and highly moral distrust of money and power which has expressed itself in so many different forms, as populism, as Bryanism, as Progressivism, as Wilsonism, and then again as LaFollettism.

Long before election day it had become plain that (under separate but parallel leadership) there were two political campaigns being waged to elect the Republican candidate. The one was the regular Republican campaign based on the orthodox theory that national prosperity was in the keeping of Republican business men. The other was a quite extraordinary campaign based on an impassioned belief that the morals of the American people were menaced by Al Smith. There is no doubt that intelligent regular Republicans looked upon the fervours of the irregular Republicans with a mixture of wonder, distrust, and even disdain. Nevertheless there were the irregular Republicans suddenly possessed with a passion for the Republican ticket the like of which no man had ever beheld. Their value in terms of votes was beyond dispute. They not only dissolved most of the distrust of Republican Big Business which normally makes a considerable section of the Party lukewarm or hostile, but they sounded the trumpets which summoned great numbers of Democrats to the Republican standard.

THE problem with which the grand strategists in Mr. Hoover's council were confronted was delicate but not difficult. They could not encourage the irregular campaign too much, for, while at the top it was extravagantly respectable and noble, down in the lower reaches it was disreputable and sinister. One of the most eminent of the leaders of this campaign, a free-lance Republican always associated with the most high-minded things, told me after the election that once when he had a night off with no speech of his own to make he had out of curiosity gone to a Heflin meeting in Atlanta, and that the savagery of the crowd's mood was such that he sneaked out of the meeting for fear that friends of his among the newspapermen might recognize him. The Republican policy was to disavow and then to ignore these barbarous manifestations of the irregular campaign.

Nevertheless, they profited tremendously by this whole irregular campaign, and until all the facts are disclosed we shall not know how far the Republican politicians encouraged it behind Mr. Hoover s back. Senator Moses was caught red-handed in the act, which I take to be a mark not of his special wickedness hut of that rather charming cynicism which he affects. Until and unless the Congress does what it ought to do, and investigates the funds which were raised and spent by the Anti-Saloon League, the W.C.T.U., the Ku Klux klan, the country as a whole will never realize what a formidable and portentous tiling this irregular Republican campaign was. My own belief is that if the Republican Party spent five million dollars legitimately, at least as much more was spent by the irregular Republicans for which no accounting whatsoever has been made.

WE had, then, two more or less separate but parallel campaigns in being, and the question is what it was that brought them harmoniously together. Obviously, it was Governor Smith who was opposed by the orthodox Republicans because lie was a Democrat, and by the irregulars because he was, in a word, an alien. But there are many things about this which it would be interesting to understand, for the matter is complicated and important. It is possible to get at them, I think, by examining the two cardinal issues of the two Republican campaigns: that prosperity about which the regulars talked and prohibition about which the irregulars talked.

First as to prosperity. Except for Senator Norris of Nebraska and a very few other western leaders, the campaign disclosed an almost complete disappearance of the old-fashioned distrust of Big Business Republicanism. It has been said that this distrust was temporarily obscured by the revolt of the non-conformist conscience on the farms and in small towns against Al Smith. That this was in part true is obvious. But I do not believe it is the whole truth; on the contrary, I believe that in the light of what happened in 1924, when Governor Smith was not a candidate, it is nearer the truth to say that the old provincial distrust of big business has been subsiding rapidly since the war. Even the discontent of the farmers in the corn and wheat belt has taken the form latterly of demand for privileges of their own rather than of an attack, as in the days of Bryan, on the privileges of corporate business. There are good reasons to think that old-style progressivism has been decadent since the war. and that the reason for its decadence is that industrial revolution in the last fifteen years which has astounded the world.

This is not the place to attempt a description of this revolution, but the main features of it are obvious: the realization by employers that high wages, shorter hours, and favourable working conditions can go hand in hand with decreasing prices and increasing profits. Mr. Hoover was right when he said that American capitalism was a new and distinct thing in the world. In the last fifteen years or so the whole principle of American capitalism has been changing. The discovery that by mass production, high pressure salesmanship, popular credit, and popular ownership of securities, it is possible to remove the ancient conflicts of interest between employer, employee, owner, and consumer is one of the most significant things in the course of industry. I am inclined to think that when it is seen in the perspective of history it will be recognized that in these years through which we. are living, a technical and financial revolution in the conduct of business provided a solution for those class conflicts which determined so much of the political debate of the Nineteenth and of the first two decades of the Twentieth Century.

AT any rate, whether this revolution is permanent or temporary, it has been sufficient to dissolve political progressivism as we used to know it in this country, and to give a wholly new content of meaning to the claim of the Republicans that they are the guardians of prosperity. Big business in America for the time being at least is no longer pictured in the popular mind as a grasping and greedy octopus. It has come to signify auto mobiles, radios, electric refrigerators and a thousand other popularly available luxuries. This industrial revolution would, I believe, have taken place no matter which party was in power. In fact it was well started while Woodrow Wilson was President. But it is the fact, nevertheless, that it has yielded its results under Republican auspices, and the conviction has fixed itself in the American mind that even better things are to come.

Against this stupendous phenomenon nobody, were he twice as great as Governor Smith, could have prevailed. Leave out of account the whole irregular campaign, and I venture to believe that the result would simply have been a repetition of 1920. The deep contentment of the American people and their buoyant confidence in the industrial future were sufficient to overwhelm any Democrat. But it must be said that Governor Smith only faintly comprehended the nature of this industrial phenomenon. His first move was to appoint Mr. Raskob, primarily in order to reassure business men that he, too, was their friend. His second move was to deny the existence of this prosperity by describing it as a myth. His third move was to appeal to the old progressivism on the theory that it was still a real force. His fourth move was to declare himself a protectionist, in theory indistinguishable from the Republicans. This vacillation, due I am sure to inexperience, simply established him as an outsider trying one door after another into the citadel of the American industrial system. Mr. Hoover was obviously inside from the start, and Governor Smith's essays were obviously too much extemporized to convince the country that he was really identified with the phenomenon of American industrial progress.

Governor Smith had really one political issue, and that was prohibition. What he had to say about farm relief and water power had either only a local interest or was rendered ineffective by the great surge of confidence in the American economic system. But prohibition is a real issue which genuinely divides the country. The plain fact is that Governor Smith did not succeed in polling the whole wet strength. Why was this? In part, of course, it was due to the fact that wet Republicans would not vote for a Democrat. But that is not the whole of it.

PROHIBITION in America is not an ordinary governmental policy. On the side of the prohibitionists it has virtually become part of the canon of the evangelical churches. The Eighteenth Amendment has become the instrument through which the evangelical churches exercise their claim to instruct and control the moral life of the American people. They are so deeply committed to the Eighteenth Amendment that to challenge it is not political disagreement but a species of heresy. Were the Eighteenth Amendment to he repealed, thousands of pulpits would regard the repeal as the defeat of the greatest moral effort made by their churches in the last fifty years. The evangelical churches have staked nearly everything upon the Eighteenth Amendment, and the defence of it is felt to be almost a matter of life and death. One must understand that, I think, to understand the fervour which is provoked when the Eighteenth Amendment is discussed.

Now this fervent attachment to the Eighteenth Amendment by no means involves an equally fervent interest in its enforcement. We are dealing with theology and not with politics: the Eighteenth Amendment is a dogma embedded in the Constitution; the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment is merely a secular enterprise. It was sufficient for Mr. Hoover to declare that the Eighteenth Amendment was noble in motive, that he was opposed to its repeal, and that he wished it to succeed; he did not have to discuss the mundane problem of its enforcement.

AMONG the wets there are those who like to drink, and there are those who regard the Eighteenth Amendment as fundamentally wrong in principle. Those who are worried about the principle of prohibition are a minority of idealists, and it was to them that Governor Smith's campaign made a strong appeal. But there remained a very large number of wets who believe they have solved the prohibition problem. They have a good bootlegger. Now there was nothing in Mr. Hoover's campaign to alarm them. They did not care for Mrs. Willebrandt, but as soon as Mrs. Willebrandt had been rusticated they were satisfied as practical fellows that Governor Smith would not repeal prohibition, and that Mr. Hoover would not enforce it upon them. The result was that prohibition as an issue was confined to its idealistic defenders and its idealistic opponents. The powerful classes who drink decided with Mr. Hughes that it was a sham issue.

This combination of people satisfied with American capitalism and people determined to defend the dogma of prohibition was fused by the personality of Al Smith. I am not forgetting that he attracted to himself some fourteen and a half million votes, of which probably ten million at least were genuinely attracted and not merely brought in by party regularity. Nor do I overlook the fact that among the ten millions there were a considerable number who were attracted to him for the very reason which repelled the other twenty millions. Al Smith lost votes because he was a Catholic. He gained votes because he was a Catholic. He lost votes because he was from the sidewalks. He also gained votes. He lost votes because lie was alien to the national political tradition. He also gained votes for that very reason. But what I am thinking about here is the effect of his personality upon the leaders and the rank and file who constitute the body of American business and American Protestantism. Their tendency was to fuse, for reasons which I have suggested, hut the personality of Al Smith fused them with extraordinary firmness.

TO say that this was due to his being a Catholic, or a wet, or an East-sider, or a Tammany sachem is to intellectualize an emotion which was stronger than any reasons which were avowed or unavowed. He was wholly strange. Everything about him was odd, unexpected, foreign, and when he was heard over the radio, the harshness of his voice, which is in reality a very kind voice, sounded brutal and alarming. He aroused prejudices which had been deeply buried, not over such matters of doctrine and policy as were discussed in the Smith-Marshall correspondence in the Atlantic Monthly, hut fear and distaste of what appeared to he a wholly alien manner of life. One of the happiest temperaments in public life emerged from the loud-speaker as one of the most ungracious; a man of deep elemental dignity sounded tough and coarse; a man of such saliency of mind that it amounts to genius sounded like an ignorant amateur. Nobody was ever more completely falsified by the machinery of publicity than AI Smith. To that, all who know him, even those who voted against him, would, I think, be willing to testify.

Those who worked most fervently against him sincerely believed they were defending the most precious things in America. They won an overwhelming victory. Yet it would be well if in the hour of their triumph the sanest and ablest of those who made this campaign a crusade, men like Mr. Borah and Mr. White, would stop to think whether it is not necessary for them to begin at once to undo some of the grievous mischief they had to countenance in order that they might prevail. They took the position that they were defending American civilization against an alien thing. Is it not a little alarming to them that this supposedly alien thing should be ten to twelve million votes strong? They countenanced the outright organization of many Protestant churches to turn votes in an election. That is no small matter to those who remember what a danger to free government is the intrusion into politics of churches as organized bodies.

Of these consequences of the campaign we have not heard the last, and if there is any cause for recrimination now that the election is over, it is that no responsible Republican from Mr. Hoover down had the courage and the insight lo see that in countenancing organized political activity by bodies of churchmen, they were setting up a very evil precedent. For my own part, as I look back upon this campaign, I am quite prepared to admit the strength of the case for Mr. Hoover and against Governor Smith: on the issues there were genuine doubt and a real choice. I am quite prepared to admit that the reasons were powerful why the country refused to turn to the Democrats. I do not even mind Senator Curtis's absurd speeches. I can understand the Klan as I would any other disease of ignorance and barbarism. But what sticks in my craw, and makes me furious every time I think of it, is the fact that President Coolidge and Mr. Hoover permitted an Assistant-Attorney General of the United States to go to a Methodist Conference and appeal to the minsters to organize for the Republican ticket. The case of Mrs. Willebrandt, because of her official position, is the one unpardonable incident in the campaign.

It was unpardonable because President Coolidge and Mr. Hoover knew that what she did deserved rebuke and dismissal, if it was not to constitute a precedent, which once established in American politics, could lead only to the most evil results. They had a great responsibility. The President of the United States must defend not merely the Constitution and the laws, the prosperity and security of the nation, but those great imponderables of human freedom which sustain the spirit of a people. Among the greatest of these is the American doctrine of the separation of church and state, not merely legally as institutions, but in fact as organized activities. Mrs. Willebrandt delivered the most serious blow at that doctrine which could he delivered, for when she appealed to the Methodists she was not only a high official of the government hut an accredited spokesman of the next President of the United States.

For that reason it will he interesting to see what President Hoover does for Mrs. Willebrandt after March 4th.