As, however, the economic policy of a state must necessarily vary from time to time with constantly changing social and material conditions, provisions dealing with the subject will more frequently, as more properly, he found in the ordinary statutory law of the state than in its fundamental or constitutional law. There are, however, a few clauses in the Constitution dealing with economic questions, the purpose of which, by safeguarding and directing it, is to employ the acquisitive instinct as a constructive force. The most direct and striking of such provisions is that of Art. 1, section 8, clause 8, by which Congress is given the power "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writ ings and discoveries." Again, as a safe guard against the evils of a depreciated currency, we find that Congress is given the power "to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin;" and "to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and cur rent coin of the United States," while the states are forbidden to "coin money, emit bills of credit," or "make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts." Finally, by the fifth Article of Amendment it is provided that no person shall be deprived of his property "without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, with out just compensation." This last clause, by the way, is an interesting il lustration of the way in which the hu man factor is of importance and must. be taken account of, whether we ap

proach a question from the standpoint. of those governing, or of those governed. The acquisitive instinct in those governing, coupled with group or class loyalties, tends to lead them into an abuse of power with respect of the property of others and must be restrained. This same instinct, in order that it may be made to contribute to the upbuilding of the economic prosperity of the whole, must be fostered and protected. The clause under discussion does both.

It

It would be possible to instance many other ways in which the framers of the Constitution did their work with an eye to the importance and potentialities of the human factor. It would be interesting, did time permit, to take up in detail the operation of the provisions we have been considering, and see how, for four generations, they have contributed to and secured the establishment and upbuilding of the freest, the most prosperous and, above all, the most firmly established and enduring popular government of all time. would be interesting, too, to see how legislative experiments, both federal and state, which have ignored the human factor, have invariably resulted in failure and disappointment or worse. The record would be a long, and, to all thoughtful persons, a convincing one. The thing which we must never forget is that in our Constitution, as in no other, the human factor is taken account of, and that under that Constitution we have enjoyed the blessings of liberty and prosperity to an extent, and for a period of time, hitherto unknown. Is it too much to argue that the latter fact is consequent upon the former?

There remains for our consideration the last of the questions which we earlier put to ourselves, namely, what, if any, has been the effect of the war upon the immediate importance of the human factor in the problems of government confronting us? In our patriotic effort to insure victory for ourselves and our allies we have, without hesitation, even with enthusiasm, permitted our government to assume responsibilities, dictate policies, and undertake activities, hitherto, almost without dissent, conceded to be more wisely and more safely entrusted to private hands. We have, without complaint, suffered dictation from this and that commission or commissioner as to what and how much we might eat, and as to how warm we might keep our houses. We have patiently seen industries classified into those said to be essential and those said not to be essential, and the latter ordered to shut down or reduce output. We have without protest acquiesced in expenditures staggering our powers of comprehension, and grimly paid taxes in amounts hitherto regarded as approaching confiscation. We have done and endured all these things and others as well, and rightly, too, because we were in the shadow of a great crisis. Ordinarily when we move our goods out of a house we pack them and carry them with care, but when the house is burning we throw them out of the window, and nobody complains or objects. No one would think, how ever, of allowing this reckless and wasteful method of handling goods to be employed under normal conditions. No more should we, as an intelligent, self-governing people, permit, after the

crisis is past, the continuance of practices conceded to have been adopted to meet that crisis. The case, however, is not by any means so simple as that of getting goods out of a house. In the first place, there may be real doubt as to whether the crisis, or some phase of it, perhaps, has passed. In the second place there may be genuine and honest difference of opinion as to whether industry or the instrumentalities of commerce, more or less disorganized by the abnormal conditions to which they have been subjected, could endure or survive a sudden and absolute abandonment to their own resources. Again there is a small but vociferous group who maintain that, regardless of whether the crisis continues, regardless of the effect upon the industry or the instrumentality of commerce, the time has come when, not only government control, but government ownership, should supersede private ownership. The air is filled with suggestions, some honest, others less so, as to what should be done and what not done. The truth is that we, together with all other civilized states, are more or less unsettled by the cataclysm which for four years has shaken the world and whose tremors are still perceptible. It may be that some day we shall get back internally to the conditions civil, political, economic and social, which we knew in July, 1914; but it is far more likely, and certainly highly desirable, that we should not. We have turned a corner and there lies before us a future of unlimited possibilities for moral, social, economic, and political development and progress. The war has brought to us lessons of inestimable value, but they are lessons

that must be read aright, and this can only be done if they are read in the light of the human factor.

The war has brought home to us certain advantages of a tremendous concentration of authority, but, at the same time, it has emphasized in no mistakable way the fact that possession of power by the individual or group inevitably begets the desire for more power. The war has shown the facility with which enormous sums of money can be raised by taxing incomes on a heavily progressive scale, and by imposing burdens on a few selected articles or activities, but it has also brought to the surface in all its repulsiveness the susceptibility to the temptation to abuse power through discrimination referable to narrow class loyalties and sectionalisms. The war has manifested the ease with which an apparent prosperity can be built up by enormous borrowings, but it is now showing us that the foundations of such a glittering structure are not as firm as could be wished, and that the real test of a man's wealth is not the size of his bank account, but the purchasing power of the dollars making up that account. And so we might go on and find similar lessons without number, each evidencing the presence and the potency of the human factor, always there, always producing the same or similar results under the same or similar conditions.

The years immediately before us are likely to prove as critical as any in our history. The forces of unrest and disorder, at all times present in the body politic, are already seeking to make capital out of the artificial social and

economic conditions in which, not we alone, but the whole civilized world finds itself as a result of four and onehalf years in which its attention and its energies have been absorbed in meeting unfamiliar and altogether abnormal conditions. Such a struggle as that through which we have passed subjects the whole life of the state to a fearful strain and renders it much more susceptible to certain dangers which in normal times, though ever present, are easily held in check. These dangers are the very dangers which we have been considering; the very dangers to which so many attempts at popular government have in the past so tragically succumbed; the very dangers to meet which our fathers, with wisdom and foresight, framed those provisions of our Constitution which we have been examining; in short, the ever present dangers of the human factor. It is inevitable, nay more, it is right, that from time to time changes take place in our Constitution, and in our laws to meet real and vital changes in our social and economic order, but such changes in our fundamental law at least, should not be made except to meet real and vital changes in that order, and then only when the new order is thoroughly understood, and with a thorough comprehension of the potentialities of the human factor. For, to paraphrase the old verse, men may come and men may go, but the human factor goes on forever. Autocracy is dead. Free institutions and popular government are the order of the day, and, please God, they are here to stay; but that government and that alone

(our own among the rest) can hope permanently to endure which is based upon a recognition of the potency and the omnipresence of the human factor,

and which is so framed and so conducts itself that the restless energy of that factor is directed along constructive rather than destructive lines.

We Americans believe that the American Revolution was the great event of the modern world. We believe that it marked a turning point in the destiny of the human race. We believe that it was the starting point of modern liberty. To trace its principles to their source, we must go back to the earliest records of mankind, to the Hebrew chronicle, the Old Testament, which proclaimed the impartial fatherhood of God; to the philosophical writings on liberty and government of the master minds among the Greeks and Romans; to the New Testament and its declaration of the brotherhood of man. In the Anglo-Saxon world we find them unfolding in the controversial writings between King James I and the church, in the works of Hooker, of Hobbes, of Algernon Sidney, of John Locke, and many others. But to discover the immediate causes and principles of our Revolution is an easy task, for they are set forth in one comprehensive document, the Declaration of Independence. There you may read the eternal truths about human rights and the just basis of government, and there is drawn up the direct indictment, the formal enumeration of the grievances which justified revolt. When the conflict became inevitable, the leaders among the Americans stepped forward

to guide it and formulated the principles and presented the facts which justified it, and the great declaration which they signed came to support the action of the sons of liberty.

And after the armed struggle was over, after independence was won, after a new nation had been born, again it was the foremost minds of America that saved it from destruction in its infancy. Looking back upon the Revolution with just pride, we must also look back upon the interval between the making of peace with Great Britain and the adoption of our Constitution with wonder that it led to an enduring triumph instead of ignominious disaster.

The very sentiment prompting the splendid daring which precipitated the rebellion against the government of England caused the people to resist the imposition upon them of any other government. They feared all government as a thing inimical to their liberties. Many of them carried the doctrine of the equal political and legal rights of men, the right of the people to govern themselves and to pursue their happiness, to the conclusion that it was the chief function of government to make men equal in their material welfare and to abolish misfortune and poverty among them.

In the five years which intervened between the coming of peace and the formation of the Constitution, this feeling found expression from one end of the country to the other. Voluntary associations were formed, composed of discontented men who called themselves "the people of America," and endeavored to make their hastilyformed desires the law in the states in which they lived. They ordered the state legislatures to pass laws to relieve them of their debts or to scale the debts down, and to give them money by printing dollar signs upon pieces of paper. They ordered the merchants, under penalty of punishment, to receive this paper in payment for goods or in satisfaction of debts. They demanded that the courts should hand down decisions which should please them. They hated judges and lawyers because they enforced and invoked the laws against them. They hated the successful merchants who sold at a profit and employed other men. They had a general aversion against all men who were prosperous, and they be lieved that that prosperity was gained only by keeping them in poverty. The small shop-keeper, the small farmer, the hired man at the mercy of his employer, poor men and unhappy men, banded together, and as they were loud in their complaints, they thought themselves a majority of the people and that they should have control of the government. Innumerable public meetings formulated grievances and demands and appointed committees to present them to legislatures and courts. In many cases they endeavored to enforce their wishes by violence.

Of

course, they found encouragement from some able men-men who courted power, ambitious men who used them for their own purposes, even some honest men who were mastered by their dreams of a reorganized and reformed society. I am not speaking of proletarians or bolsheviki arrayed against a bourgeoisie or an exploiting class, but of our own America from 1782 to 1787, when the very same forces were unleashed here that are loose in Russia today. From Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts to the "Hint Club" in South Carolina, a wild, unreasoning spirit broke out and nearly destroyed the work of the Revolution. The facts cannot be disputed. So serious was the situation that many men were talking of abandoning the effort at free government and of reverting to a mon archy. When the constitutional convention met, man after man arose to say that some action was necessary to save the country from the dangers which beset it in consequence of the excesses attempted and committed under the falsely assumed name of democracy. The members of that convention approached their task with a deep sense of responsibility. In the course of the debates James Madison "observed that, as it was more than probable we were now digesting a plan which, in its operation, would decide forever the fate of republican govern ment, we ought not only to provide every guard to liberty that its preservation could require, but be equally careful to supply the defects which our own experience had particularly pointed out." And Alexander Hamilton "concurred with Mr. Madison in think