the structure of our institutions as could not by the most intricate processes of casuistry be considered as really affecting the underlying spirit of these institutions are immediately met with protests against “changing our form of government."

What is Our Form of

Government?

Our basic form of government is that of a representative democracy designed to express the will of the people, designed to perfect a system of society in which the common will shall always be stronger than the will of any element of the population. The representative feature was, in part, shaped by the difficulties of communication when the nation was forming. Some of its devices are obviously no longer desirable in an age of rapid communication.

Our basic form of government was designed to protect the individual citizen from some of the recognised and familiar forms of governmental, economic or social oppression known to the generation which made the Constitution. It was so designed as to permit changes in the future which should appear necessary to prevent new and unforeseen types of oppression.

Made less flexible than it might have been made (133) due to a "temporary conservative reaction," it nevertheless permitted some degree of change. Not the most reactionary monarchist at the Constitutional Convention would have desired that, five generations after his death, ultra-conservative American statesmen, jurists, journalists, and merchants should offer strident protests against "changing our form of government" whenever necessary or desirable alterations might be suggested not for the basic "form" but merely for the functioning organs of American government.

The Unconscious Change in Our

Form of Government.

Our "form of government" is in reality unconsciously altered when it remains so inflexible as not to change with changing conditions in order to protect the rights of the individual citizen (134) and to prevent the growth of dominant groups perverting the organic law of the nation. "It is not thus" (by arms), said Alexander Hamilton, "that the liberty of this country is to be destroyed. It is to be subverted only by a

pretense of adhering to all the forms of law, and yet by breaking down all the substance of our liberties."

Possible Improvements Which Would
Not Change the Form.

At a period when most other civilised countries have an elastic system of government by which administrations can be changed through legislative votes of lack of confidence, America still retains a system so rigid that administrations in which grave scandals or striking corruptions are uncovered continue in power; a system so rigid and so little responsive to the popular will that Congressmen elected in the November of one year do not take their place in the national legislature until the December of the following year.

The relative inflexibility of all judiciary institutions has, because of the very peculiar nature and power of the United States Supreme Court, brought about, in this country, conditions which some well-informed and highly placed statesmen (see pages 138 and 270) have felt should be corrected. While the usual protests against the Supreme Court have largely been based on its inelasticity and its decisions declaring legislation unconstitutional, other probably more important criticisms have been based on its tendency to write legislation into its decisions. It has declared few laws unconstitutional. But its decisions have often had the weight and effect of legislation.

The too sharp distinction between the three branches of government has been criticised. To many critics some direct ex-officio relation of the members of the President's Cabinet to Congress appears desirable.

The tendency of many new governments in Europe, basing their constitutions on modern political thought, is to have one legislative body with the Cabinet taken from this body. Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Poland have (1925) adopted such a system.

Theoretical and Realistic Legislative
Representation.

In theory the individual American citizen is given legislative representation on the basis of his geographical residence. The interests which he shares with the 211,877 people of his Congressional district or the interests he shares with the mil

lion or more people represented by the Senators of his State are necessarily diffuse and indefinite. The brute facts of modern life and conditions make purely geographical representation only verbally and legally possible.

Inevitably there has developed within the National Legislature either conscious or unconscious legislative representation on the basis of interests more definite than those of geographical residence. Closely coördinated economic classes or interests, working vigorously within the party system and the existing geographical system of representation, succeed either in securing conscious legislative representation or in directly shaping, or indirectly influencing, legislation. Less closely coördinated classes or interests find less definite representation and the entirely uncoördinated classes or interests find practically no representation.

Here is obviously an instance in which the common will of the nation sometimes finds less effective expression than the will of certain groups within the nation. The time impends when it will be essential that conscious expression be given to, and conscious instrumentalities established for, the harmonious functioning of the economic realities affecting the lives of American citizens so that all economic interests and classes shall find in the national legislature the representation that is now only possessed by some of these interests and classes.

Not the provision of these new instrumentalities will represent any essential change in our basic form of government. The failure to provide such instrumentalities will represent an essential change (by conditions) in our form of government since without them, when it is clearly apparent that they are necessary, some individuals or classes gain representation or privileges lacking or denied to other individuals and classesa thing repugnant to the whole spirit of our character and our institutions.

The Electoral College is obviously an outgrown appendix which should be excised.

The development of the machinery of American political parties during five generations has been such that, due to the caucus system, a very small minority of the members of the dominant party can almost completely control legislation. (135)

These are but a few, and not the most important, of typical possible defects in the American governmental machinery which, if considered desirable by the nation, might easily be

remedied by changes which would, in no real sense, affect our basic "form" of government but might, indeed, give greater power and vigor to the fundamental form of government which our governmental machinery, in theory, exists to realise. It is not necessarily intimated that such changes are desirable.

"Property Rights" and "Human Rights."

Some phases of the individualism of early America, as expressed, have permitted the development of tendencies almost beyond question anti-social in their nature and effect.

The "natural rights" of man when applied, without limitation, to the possession of property, produce, inevitably, conditions in which the rights of other men must sooner or later be sacrificed. (136) The administration of a government by men supported by or too closely associated with those whose physical possessions have given them undue influence will frequently inevitably deprive some individual of that right to completely unabridged freedom of thought, of speech, of press, and of public assemblage which, from any point of view, should never be abrogated at any time in any nation calling itself a free nation.

Everywhere on earth, with the increase of population and the development of civilisation, the relation between property rights and human rights will become a more difficult problem to solve. Theodore Roosevelt appears to have approximated the typical early American attitude towards this matter when he said:

"I believe in property rights. I believe that normally the rights of property and of humanity coincide. But sometimes they conflict and where this is so I put human rights above property rights."

To any degree in which powerful groups in the nation are able to wield undue influence in selecting the functionaries of the government, undue influence in the passage of legislation or undue influence in the administration or interpretation of legislation, the basic and fundamental American attempt to develop a social organism is defeated and the nation becomes again merely a social organisation dominated by the will of

small groups, as in the case of ancient autocracies or oligarchies —no longer a nation held together by law expressing the common will of all those comprising the nation, a law superior to any group or groups whatsoever.

To the degree in which legislation is especially beneficial to any group or groups or to the degree in which any group or groups has privileges not commonly granted, the health and well-being of the social organism is adversely affected and a cancerous condition engendered which, if not remedied, will, as all past history proves, inevitably destroy the whole organism.

To the degree to which at any time in war or in peace, in times of placidity and prosperity or in times of passion and panic, guarantees written into the Constitution are abrogated the arbitrary will of individual men or groups of men-again coerces other men precisely as if the American experiment had never been. Whatever excuses are offered for these abrogations they establish dangerous precedents.

New Conditions Necessitate Rephrasing of the Essential National Ideals.

Intense study or consideration of many current phenomena in America-in the light not of what the Americans of the late eighteenth century said but in the light of what it is highly probable they would have said today in trying to find proper contemporary expression for the deepest impulses actuating the Americans of the time-will disclose, almost inevitably, the fact that to bring satisfactory realisation of their desiresome rephrasing of the essential American ideas of individualism, some new minor or major adjustment or adaptation of the American governmental or political machinery either is or may soon become desirable if not necessary. We are beginning to be in danger of losing the substance in reverencing the form; we are beginning to tend to drift behind instead of forging ahead; we are tending to become static and content instead of dynamic and aspiring.

The Changed Environment.

The environmental conditions surrounding American life have totally and completely changed. Again the westward movement of humanity has met a barrier-this time a final barrier.