be dealt with merely by doing what seems to you and to me to be the expedient thing in this situation and that situation to-day or to-morrow. Our people must base themselves upon a foundation of principle. They must renew their loyalty to ideals. And the basic principle is the principle of American law.

It is the principle of individual liberty which has grown out of the life of the Anglo-Saxon race and has been waxing strong during all the 700 years since Magna Charta. That was the formative principle that made America, the United States and Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf to the frozen north, English speaking, pursuing the course of the common law, preserving liberty and doing justice. That, the power of that principle of individual liberty that developed in the life of our race, is the greatest formative power in the history of the world. Over against it stands the principle of the State. Upon the one hand is the declaration in that great instrument, the value of which we hardly yet appreciate, the immortal declaration, penned by Thomas Jefferson, that all men are created with inalienable rights, which governments are created to preserve. On the other hand is the principle that States are created with supreme rights which all individuals are bound to observe. The one centers the system of law and order and justice upon the inalienable right of the individual, the other centres the system of law and order and justice upon the rights of the State, which subordinates the rights of the individual, and that is the fundamental question which is being fought out upon the battlefields of Europe.

Here in this country we have enjoyed liberty and order so long that we have forgotten how they came. Our people assume that they come as the air comes, to be breathed; they have assumed that they will, of their nature and by their own force, continue forever, without effort. Ah, no! Liberty has always been born of struggle, it has not come save through sacrifice and the blood of martyrs and the devotion of man

kind. And it is not to be preserved except by jealous watchfulness and stern determination always to be free.

That eternal vigilance is the price of liberty is such a truism that it has lost its meaning, but it is an eternal truth, and the principles of American liberty to-day stand in need of a renewed devotion on the part of the American people. We have forgotten that in our vast material prosperity. We have grown rich, we have lived in ease and comfort and peace so long, that we have forgotten to what we owe those agreeable incidents of life. We must be prepared to defend our individual liberty in two ways. We must be prepared to do it first by force of arms against all external aggression. God knows I love peace and I despise all foolish and wicked wars, but I do not wish for my country the peace of slavery or dishonor or injustice or poltroonery. I want to see in my country the spirit that beat in the breast of the men at Concord Bridge, who were just and God-fearing men, but who were ready to fight for their liberty. And if the hundred million people of America have that spirit and it is made manifest, they won't have to fight.

Another circumstance which we ought not to lose sight of is the fact that a vast number of people have come to the United States within very recent times from those countries of Europe which differ so widely in their fundamental conceptions of law and personal freedom from ourselves.

The millions of immigrants who have come from the Continent of Europe have come from communities which have not the traditions of individual liberty, but the traditions of State control over liberty; they have come from communities in which the courts are part of the administrative system of the government, not independent tribunals to do justice between the individual and the government; they have come from communities in which the law is contained in codes framed and imposed upon the people by superior power, and not communities like ours, in which the law is the growth of the life

of the people, made by the people, through their own recognition of their needs.

It is a slow process to change the attitude of the individual toward law, toward political principles. It cannot be done in a moment, and this great mass of men, good men, good women, without our traditions, but with entirely different traditions, will change us unless we change them.

Fifteen per cent of the lawyers of this city are foreign born. Fifty per cent of the lawyers of this city are either foreign born or of foreign parents. And the great mass of them have in their blood, with all the able and brilliant and good and noble men among them — have in their blood necessarily the traditions of the countries from which they came. They cannot help it. They will hold those traditions until they are expelled by the spirit of American institutions. That is a question of time. And somebody has got to look after it. Somebody had got to make the spirit of those institutions vocal. Somebody has got to exhibit belief in them, trust in them, devotion to them, loyalty to them, or you cannot win this great body from Continental Europe to a true understanding of and loyalty to our institutions. .

Here is a great new duty for the bar, and if we have not been hypocrites during all these years in which we have been standing up in court and appealing to the principles of the law, appealing to the principles of our Constitution, demanding justice according to the rules of the common law for our clients; if we have not been hypocrites, we will come to the defence and the assertion the triumphant assertion of those principles upon which we have been relying. .

The whole business of government, in which we are all concerned, is becoming serious, grave, threatening. No man in America has any right to rest contented and easy and indifferent, for never before, not even in the time of the civil war, all the energies and all the devotion of the American democracy been demanded for the perpetuity of American institutions,

have

for the continuance of the American republic against foes without and more insidious foes within, than in this year of grace 1916.

INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT

ELIHU ROOT

[From a speech before the New York State Constitutional Convention on August 30, 1915. In discussing the short ballot amendment (the purpose of which was to concentrate responsible power in the hands of the governor and one or two other elective officers), Mr. Root took occasion to lay bare, with fearless force and precision, the evil workings of the boss system as it sometimes appears in American politics. Roscoe Conkling and Thomas C. Platt were United States senators from New York and political bosses within the recollection of all the men who attended the convention which Mr. Root was addressing. The phrase "invisible government" was first used, in the sense in which Mr. Root used it, by former Senator A. J. Beveridge, of Indiana, in an address at Indianapolis in 1912. It then became current.]

I AM going to discuss a subject now that goes back to the beginning of the political life of the oldest man in this Convention, and one to which we cannot close our eyes, if we keep the obligations of our oath. We talk about the government of the Constitution. We have spent many days in discussing the powers of this and that and the other officer. What is the government of this State? What has it been during the forty years of my acquaintance with it? The government of the Constitution? Oh, no; not half the time, or half way. When I ask, what do the people find wrong in our State government, my mind goes back to those periodic fits of public rage in which the people rouse up and tear down the political leader, first of one party and then of the other. It goes on to the public feeling of resentment against the control of party organizations, of both parties and of all parties.

Now, I treat this subject in my own mind not as a personal

question to any man. I am talking about the system. They call the system - I don't coin the phrase, I adopt it because it carries its own meaning - the system they call "invisible government." For I don't remember how many years, Mr. Conkling was the supreme ruler in this State; the Governor did not count, the legislatures did not count; comptrollers and secretaries of state and what not, did not count. It was what Mr. Conkling said, and in a great outburst of public rage he was pulled down.

Then Mr. Platt ruled the State; for nigh upon twenty years he ruled it. It was not the Governor; it was not the Legislature; it was not any elected officers; it was Mr. Platt. And the capitol was not here; it was at 49 Broadway; Mr. Platt and his lieutenants.

The ruler of the State during the greater part of the forty years of my acquaintance with the State government has not been any man authorized by the Constitution or by the law, and, sir, there is throughout the length and breadth of this State a deep and sullen and long-continued resentment at being governed thus by men not of the people's choosing. The party leader is elected by no one, accountable to no one, bound by no oath of office, removable by no one. It is all wrong that a government not authorized by the people should be continued superior to the government that is authorized by the people.

How is it accomplished? How is it done? Mr. Chairman, it is done by the use of patronage, and the patronage that my friends on the other side of this question have been arguing and pleading for in this Convention is the power to continue that invisible government against that authorized by the people. Everywhere, sir, that these two systems of government co-exist, there is a conflict day by day, and year by year, between two principles of appointment to office, two radically opposed principles. The elected officer or the appointed officer, the lawful officer who is to be held responsible for the administra