haracterized the Convention. Had these men been gathered together
today, even the same men, they would frame a very different document,
for they took conditions and men as they were, and, with an
indestructible hope to glorify their common sense, they produced a
masterpiece. It is in the same spirit that we must approach our problem
of today.

Now in considering the situation that confronts us, we find certain
respects in which either the methods are bad, or the results, or both.
There is no unanimity in this criticism, indeed I doubt if any two of us
would agree on all the items in the indictment, though we all might
unite on one or two. I can only give my own list for what it is worth.
In the first place we, in common with all the nations, have drifted into
imperialism of a gross scale and illiberal, even tyrannical working. We
could hardly do otherwise for such has been the universal tendency for
more than an hundred years. By constant progression municipal
governments have absorbed into themselves matters that in decency, and
with any regard for liberty, belong to the individual. Simultaneously
our state governments have followed the same course, infringing even on
the just prerogatives of the towns and cities, while, more than all, the
national government has robbed the states, the cities and the citizens
of what should belong to them, until at last we have an imperial,
autocratic, inquisitorial, and largely irresponsible government at
Washington that is the one supreme political fact; we are no longer a
Federal Republic but an Imperialism, in which is centralized all the
authority inherent in the one hundred and ten millions of our population
and from which a constantly diminishing stream of what is practically
devolved authority, trickles down through state and city to the
individual in the last instance--if it gets there at all! This I believe
to be absolutely and fatally wrong. In the first place, human society
cannot function at this abnormal scale, it is outside the human scale,
for in spite of our pride and insolence there are limits on every hand
to what man can do. In the second place, I conceive it to be absolutely
at variance with any principle of republicanism or democracy or even of
free monarchy. It is at one only with the imperialism of Egypt, Babylon,
Rome and the late Empire of Germany. In a free monarchy, a republic, or
a democracy, the pyramid of political organism stands, not on its point
but br