u were going to do with your Government,
but questions of how you were going to constitute your Government,--how
you were going to balance the powers of the States and the Federal
Government, how you were going to balance the claims of property against
the processes of liberty, how you were going to make your governments up
so as to balance the parts against each other so that the legislature
would check the executive, and the executive the legislature, and the
courts both of them put together. The whole conception of government
when the United States became a Nation was a mechanical conception of
government, and the mechanical conception of government which underlay
it was the Newtonian theory of the universe. If you pick up the
Federalist, some parts of it read like a treatise on astronomy instead
of a treatise on government. They speak of the centrifugal and the
centripetal forces, and locate the President somewhere in a rotating
system. The whole thing is a calculation of power and an adjustment of
parts. There was a time when nobody but a lawyer could know enough to
run the Government of the United States, and a distinguished English
publicist once remarked, speaking of the complexity of the American
Government, that it was no proof of the excellence of the American
Constitution that it had been successfully operated, because the
Americans could run any constitution. But there have been a great many
technical difficulties in running it.

And then something happened. A great question arose in this country
which, though complicated with legal elements, was at bottom a human
question, and nothing but a question of humanity. That was the slavery
question. And is it not significant that it was then, and then for the
first time, that women became prominent in politics in America? Not many
women; those prominent in that day were so few that you can name them
over in a brief catalogue, but, nevertheless, they then began to play a
part in writing, not only, but in public speech, which was a very novel
part for women to play in America. After the Civil War had settled some
of what seemed to be the most difficult legal questions of our system,
the life of the Nation began not only to unfold, but to accumulate. Life
in the United States was a comparatively simple matter at the time of
the Civil War. There was none of that underground struggle which is now
so manifest to those who look only a little way beneath the surface.
Sto