imitations
of the human mind. He could postpone, but he could not avert, the impact
of conflicting social forces. In 1789 he compromised, but he did not
determine the question of sovereignty. He eluded an impending conflict
by introducing courts as political arbitrators, and the expedient worked
more or less well until the tension reached a certain point. Then it
broke down, and the question of sovereignty had to be settled in
America, as elsewhere, on the field of battle. It was not decided until
Appomattox. But the function of the courts in American life is a subject
which I shall consider hereafter.

If the invention of gunpowder and printing in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries presaged the Reformation of the sixteenth, and if
the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth was the forerunner of
political revolutions throughout the Western World, we may well, after
the mechanical and economic cataclysm of the nineteenth, cease wondering
that twentieth-century society should be radical.

Never since man first walked erect have his relations toward nature been
so changed, within the same space of time, as they have been since
Washington was elected President and the Parisian mob stormed the
Bastille. Washington found the task of a readjustment heavy enough, but
the civilization he knew was simple. When Washington lived, the fund of
energy at man's disposal had not very sensibly augmented since the fall
of Rome. In the eighteenth, as in the fourth century, engineers had at
command only animal power, and a little wind and water power, to which
had been added, at the end of the Middle Ages, a low explosive. There
was nothing in the daily life of his age which made the legal and
administrative principles which had sufficed for Justinian insufficient
for him. Twentieth-century society rests on a basis not different so
much in degree, as in kind, from all that has gone before. Through
applied science infinite forces have been domesticated, and the action
of these infinite forces upon finite minds has been to create a tension,
together with a social acceleration and concentration, not only
unparalleled, but, apparently, without limit. Meanwhile our laws and
institutions have remained, in substance, constant. I doubt if we have
developed a single important administrative principle which would be
novel to Napoleon, were he to live again, and I am quite sure that we
have no legal principle younger than Justinian.

As a resu