d they have been there so long and got
so old that they don't understand any of the new questions anyhow, and
could not, and who have the conservatism of age anyway, and they have
got to decide whether that law is constitutional or not, and before
they have decided it and before it has run the gauntlet of all of
them, even if they decided it right you would not need the law. The
law would be dead. (Laughter). But you must combine on all these four
things before you can accomplish anything.

And that is not all. Then you must decide whether the law is within
the province of the state or the nation; whether it is state business
or whether it is national business; and most of our laws are state
laws and when we get back to the state we find the same old story.
Wonderful wisdom! Here is first a constitution, which is nothing
except as I illustrated, a boy twenty-one years old swears he won't
know any more when he is fifty, and that kind of a boy generally does
not. (Laughter). And we have a legislative body to make laws, composed
of a house and a senate, two bodies, one not being wise enough to make
them themselves; and we have a governor with a veto, and a Supreme
Court to say whether the law is constitutional or not. The same thing
in the state and the same thing in the nation. Then we have got to see
whether it is in the province of the nation or the state, and you see
it is next to impossible to ever get a constitutional law that amounts
to anything, and we have never done it.

But, they say, this is a country where people vote, and if you don't
like the law, why change it. If you didn't vote there would be some
excuse for direct action, but as long as you vote you can change the
law. (Applause). The trouble is you can't change it. You haven't got a
chance. How can you change one of these laws that are important? How
can you appeal to the people, first of all, and change it with the
people? And next, how could you possibly elect a congress and a
senate and a president and a Supreme Court all at once, that ever
would make any substantial change, or ever did?

"Well," they say, "if the Constitution fetters you too much, why,
change the Constitution. The Constitution provides that it can be
changed." And so it does; but how?

You can change the Constitution of the United States. You could change
Mt. Hood, but it would take a pile of shovels. (Laughter). You could
change Mt. Hood a good deal easier. It could be done. Th