thority and designed a central authority periodically changed by the people and continuously held in check by constitutional limitations and guarantees.

It marked a less definite and complete break with the past than was sometimes earlier believed because it took from the past political devices-the product of ruling class experience— very effective in holding in check, at least temporarily, the will of the people, particularly in a new era in which new devices of communication render the expression of the popular will more quickly possible.

It must always be remembered that it is quite conceivable that a government very much less centralised, giving practical expression to much more democratic ideas, might not have survived and that this continent today might be the seat of conflicting small nations instead of one great nation. Every free people needs some of the honest conservatism which partly influenced the writing of the American Constitution. (119)

The Constitution was a very successful effort to catch up and give form to many of the most vivid threads of evolving political thought and aspiration.

A Human Production.

When all this has been said the fact remains that the document was a human production carefully designed to meet intricate conditions of a certain time and place. It was never meant to be immune to criticism or divinely proof against change or amendment. It was given sufficient potential flexibility to permit it to be altered to meet changing conditions and thus potentially to permit and foster the most wholesome adaptation of America to changing world conditions and changing world thought developing from new conditions.

There are devices and implications in the Constitution which can be made so static as to retard the changes inevitably necessary in any evolving organism-social or otherwise-and thus to create conditions which might require violence and revolution for changes inevitably necessary.

The men who wrote the Constitution were not gods. They were men. Confronted with the world of 1925 instead of the world of 1787 they might have produced a document quite different in detail however like in essential underlying char

acter.

No one of them could have desired to have their work result

in the growth of such blind creeds, of such eternal, uncritical confidence in their product that the nation they were making should be run off into some blind alley and not kept dynamically and vigorously in the very center of the main stream of human evolution and growth.

The Americanism they-as a whole-had to express was essentially an attempt not only to break away from all save the best in the past but also an attempt to disrupt static customs and to keep thought from congealing into dogmas or sacrosanct institutions.

No one of those men-whatever the conservative opinions or economic actuality shaping his thoughts-would have wished to see develop in America the cancerous growth of any interest or group of interests which, by the manipulation of blind political creeds-expressed in formulas or "slogans"or of static political devices, could gain such power as would adversely affect the wholesome growth of the nation as a whole, cause it to lag behind in the general political development of the race or actually imperil its very existence. They sought to give governmental devices the quality of organs of government fit for an evolving organism, not to leave them mere mechanical devices for a fixed mechanical organisation.

It is doubtful whether the Constitutional Convention would have considered any development more dangerous to the endurance of the institutions it was founding than the uncritical confidence and the unreasoning loyalty which government (120) and school, press and pulpit preach so frequently today. Divergent Ideas and Ideals in the Constitution.

In the Constitution we see that there were implicit antithetical ideas and ideals. As in the case of all others these ideas and ideals have been very crudely phrased in easy formulas. They have greatly influenced the history of the country.

It is recognised that Hamilton and Jefferson were the respective spokesmen for the extremes of these divergent ideals in the early days of the nation. Books have been written to prove that these two men and their respective followers reppresent the conflict between "agrarian" and "capitalist" interests; (121) between "property rights" and "human rights," between "conservatism" and "radicalism," between "aristocracy" and "democracy." A certain truth exists in each

assertion and no complete truth in any one or in all of them. The truth is too complicated to be phrased in any formula or combination of formulas.

Experience and Aspiration.

It might be said probably with a slightly greater approximation to truth that the conflict represents one between the actual experience of societies of the past and the aspirations seeking to shape societies of the future. Societies of the past were organisations created by force and to the degree that ideas based on them find expression in our institutions there has been and will be an inevitable tendency to centralise power and to have a social organisation, governed by alleged "superior men."

The ideas of Jefferson are those based upon an ideal purpose. They represent to some degree the actual tendencies of political development in the world since the American and French Revolutions, but not the actual experiences of preAmerican nations. They tend to help the transformation of social organisations into social organisms. Despite the first apparent conflict, the underlying idea in Jefferson's democratic individualism appears closer to true collectivist theory than the underlying ideas in Hamilton's conservatism which inevitably permit the eventual development of arbitrary group control.

The ideas of Hamilton result from experience. But they tend to become static.

The ideas of Jefferson are by their nature, even yet, largely untried and untested and to that degree very vulnerable to hostile conservative criticism. But they are dynamic. Without their influence society would never wholesomely progress. Hamilton analysed the folkways. Jefferson relied-sometimes too much-upon the intelligence of his fellow men.

The ideas shaping the United States have been an admixture of these relatively static and dynamic attitudes and tendencies. The political parties of the United States have—in general— crudely attempted to give form to these respective attitudes and tendencies.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CHARACTERISTIC EARLY AMERICAN IDEAS IN RELATION TO THE NATION OF TODAY

The Small Beginning.

The thirteen States of North America which united themselves into one nation in 1787 had a population of about 4,000,ooo people. They had large settlements only in the relatively narrow strip along the seaboard. They were not yet renowned for wealth and power. The ideas they proclaimed were vaguely feared by the governments of the older countries. But in the general balance of power between the nations of the world the States were not seriously to be considered, certainly they were not formidable.

The Mighty Growth.

Less than one hundred fifty years have passed-a brief term in the life of peoples-yet, already, the new nation appears at times almost to dominate the world. It has over a hundred million people. It has wealth beyond the experience of any previous nation. It reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. It has numerous insular possessions and exerts powerful pressure on the governments of numerous small American nations. Its wealth, man-power, and the formulation and application, by President Wilson, of its basic aspirations to the situation arising from the World War (122) helped greatly, perhaps entirely, to change the balance of power in Europe and to give the death blow to European monarchial systems.

The United States of America has during less than five generations given the world not only new ideas of polity which have changed human life everywhere but also numerous inventions and devices which have changed human life

even more.

The vast extent of its territory is tied together by the most intricate system of roads and railroads. Sectionalism has

diminished rather than increased. Its citizens have, indeed, become everywhere so similar as to create criticism of standardisation. The perfecting of numerous methods of communication has permitted the almost simultaneous promulgation of thought throughout the country so that the nation has, in one sense, greater cohesion than small countries had a century ago.

Its

It is the most successful experiment in internationalism that the world has known. Men of all races constitute it. area might well have been the scene of numerous contending small nations each with armies, customs barriers, tribal prejudices and vanities. Instead it has been the scene of one free people who have almost come to forget the sinister appurtenances of European nationalism.

The thirteen original States were the nucleus of a nation so different in origin and development from almost all other nations that have gone before that comparison with them is difficult, almost impossible.

The Few Changes in External
Political Form.

Yet despite this development; despite this growth of wealth and power, the nation, politically, represents surprisingly few variations from the original plan of the men who founded it. While the centuries-old political institutions of many other nations have been almost entirely changed during the past century; the American nation, now one of the oldest from the standpoint of continuing political institutions, remains, in apparent political form, almost exactly as it began. There have been many minor changes requiring conflict, and even such a struggle as the Civil War for their consummation. Yet, these changes were, nevertheless, minor in their relation to the original plan. The expressed political philosophy, the formal political institutions of the United States have-in relation to the almost incredible changes in other aspects of the national lifebeen scarcely at all affected, during the period of its great expansion. Our history-to this point-represents a cohering, adjustment, coördination of our national elements. It represents no essential changes in external political form.

John Marshall made a decisive clarification of the question of the balance of the governmental functions by arrogating to the Supreme Court the right to declare laws unconstitutional.