ing very closely
approaching dictatorship. Another feature of this system aggravated its
evils. As population grew, political campaigns became more expensive.
At the same time, as wealth grew, corporations for production and
transportation increased in capital and extent of operations and became
more dependent upon the protection or toleration of government. They found
a ready means to secure this by contributing heavily to the campaign funds
of political organizations, and therefore their influence played a large
part in determining who should be nominated and elected to office. So
that in many states political organizations controlled the operations of
government, in accordance with the wishes of the managers of the great
corporations. Under these circumstances our governmental institutions were
not working as they were intended to work, and a desire to break up and
get away from this extra constitutional method of controlling our
constitutional government has caused a great part of the new political
methods of the last few years. It is manifest that the laws which were
entirely adequate under the conditions of a century ago to secure
individual and public welfare must be in many respects inadequate to
accomplish the same results under all these new conditions; and our people
are now engaged in the difficult but imperative duty of adapting their laws
to the life of to-day. The changes in conditions have come very rapidly
and a good deal of experiment will be necessary to find out just what
government can do and ought to do to meet them.

The process of devising and trying new laws to meet new conditions
naturally leads to the question whether we need not merely to make new laws
but also to modify the principles upon which our government is based and
the institutions of government designed for the application of those
principles to the affairs of life. Upon this question it is of the utmost
importance that we proceed with considerate wisdom.

By institutions of government I mean the established rule or order of
action through which the sovereign (in our case the sovereign people)
attains the ends of government. The governmental institutions of Great
Britain have been established by the growth through many centuries of a
great body of accepted rules and customs which, taken together, are
called the British Constitution. In this country we have set forth in the
Declaration of Independence the principles which we consider