etent to serve their purposes efficiently in an economical
and coherent national organization, or else they must be superseded. A
prejudice against centralization is as pernicious, provided
centralization is necessary, as a prejudice in its favor. All rights
under the law are functions in a democratic political organism and must
be justified by their actual or presumable functional adequacy.

The ideal of a constructive relation between American nationality and
American democracy is in truth equivalent to a new Declaration of
Independence. It affirms that the American people are free to organize
their political, economic, and social life in the service of a
comprehensive, a lofty, and far-reaching democratic purpose. At the
present time there is a strong, almost a dominant tendency to regard the
existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror
from modifying it even in the smallest detail; and it is this
superstitious fear of changing the most trivial parts of the fundamental
legal fabric which brings to pass the great bondage of the American
spirit. If such an abject worship of legal precedent for its own sake
should continue, the American idea will have to be fitted to the rigid
and narrow lines of a few legal formulas; and the ruler of the American
spirit, like the ruler of the Jewish spirit of old, will become the
lawyer. But it will not continue, in case Americans can be brought to
understand and believe that the American national political organization
should be constructively related to their democratic purpose. Such an
ideal reveals at once the real opportunity and the real responsibility
of the American democracy. It declares that the democracy has a
machinery in a nationalized organization, and a practical guide in the
national interest, which are adequate to the realization of the
democratic ideal; and it declares also that in the long run just in so
far as Americans timidly or superstitiously refuse to accept their
national opportunity and responsibility, they will not deserve the names
either of freemen or of loyal democrats. There comes a time in the
history of every nation, when its independence of spirit vanishes,
unless it emancipates itself in some measure from its traditional
illusions; and that time is fast approaching for the American people.
They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a
nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely