posal for the creation of a central authority submitted for acceptance or rejection by the people of the several States, assembled in conventions called for the purpose. The power of the purse had been the weapon with which the people of England had coerced recognition of popular rights, and this power, with the power to declare war, was given to the legislative branch of the new government to insure the supremacy of the people, through their representatives, over the government which they were establishing.

President Wilson was wont to say that institutions are profoundly affected by current theories of physical science; that the constitutional fathers had reflected the Newtonian physics into the Constitution, and that the so-called checks and balances provided there are the political analogue of that great equivalence of forces by which the planets, and even the solar systems, are kept steady to their courses in space. Our later attitude toward the Constitution Mr. Wilson plainly regarded as a reflection of the Darwinian hypothesis, involving growth and change through progressive adaptation.

Bagehot would undoubtedly have regarded the Constitution, as it came from the hands

of its framers, as but a part of that vast customary law which he calls the most beneficent and the most despotic tyranny the human race has ever experienced, and he would have looked upon our later attitude toward the Constitution as a product of that “age of discussion" which alone has made progress possible against the restraints of custom.

Perhaps these speculations are a bit oldfashioned. The facts useful to us are few and easily stated. The fathers made a very simple Constitution. They avoided controversy by refraining from definitions and details, and they started their government under it by filling all the important public offices with men who had character and traditions reaching back through hundreds of years of the struggle for constitutional liberty in England. It was this character and these traditions which made the Constitution a success. Without Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, not only this Constitution, but any constitution, would have failed.

We shall see as we go on that the checks and balances have probably too often checked and not always balanced, and that modification by public discussion has sometimes had a long, dark road to travel, but from 1789 to

1925 is one hundred and thirty-six years. In that time three thousand proposals have been officially made to amend the Constitution. Doubtless, many of these proposals are duplicates in form, and many more in substance, of one another. But only nineteen amendments have, in fact, been made. Of these the first ten followed at once upon the adoption of the Constitution, and were a part of the inducement by which its ratification was secured. The Eleventh followed the decision of Chisholm vs. Georgia. The Twelfth grew out of the fact that neither Jefferson nor Aaron Burr could secure a majority of the votes in the electoral college. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth resulted from the Civil War. The Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth are genuine instances of deliberate adaptation by public discussion to an increased consciousness of democracy on the part of the people. The Eighteenth Amendment is, of course, a complete departure from our constitutional theory, and no doubt was adopted because of the moral enthusiasms engendered by our position in the World War. The work of the fathers has thus stood with relatively little change, and the attitude of America toward this great charter is, perhaps,

just that attitude of “animated moderation' which Bagehot regards as the condition of enduring progress.

PROGRESS

Now for a definition of progress. At the outset let me say that I have no idea of participating in the schoolmen's dispute as to whether or not there is such a thing. Lord Balfour tried it and in the end threw up his hands with an expression of doubt. That there are vast changes in human conditions is obvious to the senses. Whether or not any of these changes are sufficiently general to be what Bagehot would call "verifiable progress" depends upon the point of view. That is to say, it depends upon whether the change has been in a direction consonant with some deeply entertained wish on the part of the particular observer. There have been, however, certain periods in human history, of relatively brief duration, in which profound and fundamental modifications have taken place in significant human relations, as, for instance, when one, or, at the most, two in the long and dreary line of Egyptian dynasties flared up in a blaze of material grandeur and martial power, or that brief period of intel

lectual splendor in Athens which we know as the age of Pericles, and which still shines across the centuries with unapproachable brilliance. Yet it was very brief. Sophocles was fifteen years old when the battle of Salamis was fought. Eschylus fought in that battle as an elderly soldier and Euripides was born upon the day on which the battle occurred, yet between the maturity of Eschylus and the maturity of Euripides the Greek mind underwent a revolutionary change, and when Euripides died Greece had made her contribution to history and was through.

Progress in the sense in which I am using it, therefore, in this discussion has to do with change, without stopping to inquire whether the change is in itself for better or for worse, or is or is not compensated by loss in some other direction-change fundamental enough to affect generally the relations of men among themselves and to things, change so thoroughgoing as to leave the world different in its motives and resting on new moral foundations.

Of course, I realize that there are just a few ultimate moralities, and that they are unchanging, but the atmosphere in which these moralities must function does change, so that accept for my definition of progress a con

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