lectual level of Mr. Bryan, Mr. Henry George, or Mr. Bellamy."

Still, the transformation of farmers and craftsmen into proletarians, the accumulation of huge private fortunes, the corporate domination of government, and a growing acceptance of the cynical wisdom that politicians were either criminals or fools indicated that apprehensions about the drift toward "imperatorship and anarchy," as Henry George referred to it, were not misplaced. The acquisition of territorial possessions overseas offered another sign, not only to radicals and Populists but in this case to a considerable body of eminently respectable opinion, that the republican phase of American history had come to an end. The debate about the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines was one of the last occasions on which the old language of republicanism figured prominently in public affairs. Opponents of annexation stressed the choice between "republic and empire," in the words of George S. Boutwell, president of the Anti-Imperialist League. They foresaw a standing army, the age-old "menace and terror of popular government." They reminded the country of the republican truism that a "standing army means a reduction of wages." According to Moorfield Storey, imperialism also meant a "great increase of wealth and fresh fields for corruption," the "spoils system enormously extended," and the "growth of a class little accustomed to respect the rights of their inferiors." Acquisition of the Philippines represented a momentous departure from the country's founding principles, the beginning of an all too familiar decline from republican simplicity into imperial corruption. History was repeating itself, anti-imperialists believed: the American people, like so many people before them, were about to exchange their liberties for the fatal promise of foreign conquest and military grandeur.

There were good reasons, then, for the "fin-de-siècle obsession with cataclysm" that has troubled historians. The subsequent development of industrial civilization does not justify the assumption that the modern world is exempt from the "law of civilization and decay." If the nine

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