cal age. It was framed at the very end of the
pastoral-agricultural age and at a time when the spirit of
individualism was in full flower. The hardy pioneers who, with their
axes, made straight the pathway of an advancing civilization, were
sturdy men who need not be undervalued to us of the mechanical age. The
"prairie schooner," which met the elemental forces of Nature with the
proud challenge: "Pike's Peak or bust," produced as fine a type of
manhood as the age which travels either in Mr. Ford's "fliver" or the
more luxurious Rolls-Royce.

The Constitution was framed in the period that marked the passing of the
primitive age and the dawn of the day of the machine. Watt had recently
discovered the potency of steam vapour as a motive power; but its only
use at first was for pumping water out of the mines.

When the framers of the Constitution met in high convention in
Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a Connecticut Yankee, John Fitch,
was then also working in Philadelphia upon his steamboat; but twenty
years were to pass before the prow of the _Clermont_ was to part the
waters of the Hudson, and nearly a half century before transportation
was to be revolutionized by the utilization of Watt's invention in the
locomotive. Of the wonders of the steamship, the railroad, the
telegraphic cable, the wireless, the gasoline engine, and a thousand
other mechanical miracles, the framers of the American Constitution did
not even dream.

The greatest and noblest purpose of the Constitution was not alone to
hold in nicest equipose the relative powers of the nation and the
States, but also to maintain in the scales of justice a true equilibrium
between the rights of government and the rights of an individual. It did
not believe that the State was omnipotent or infallible, and yet it
proclaimed its authority within wise and just limits. It defended the
integrity of the human soul.

In other governments, these fundamental decencies of liberty rest upon
the conscience of the legislature. Under the American Constitution,
they are part of the fundamental law, and, as such, enforceable by
judges sworn to defend the integrity of the individual as fully as the
integrity of the State.

When did a nobler "vision" inspire men in the political annals of
mankind? Without that vision to restrain each succeeding generation of
Americans from the tempting excesses of political power, the American
Commonwealth, with its great heterogeneous dem