erive from being president of a
university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from
all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary
by their presence. I had been casting around in my mind for something by
which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was
my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been
devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century.
His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of
anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his
thought the thing I had been waiting for. He called my attention to the
fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend
to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example,
after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all
thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian
Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody
is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development
and accommodation to environment.

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution
of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian
Theory. You have only to read the papers of _The Federalist_ to see that
fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of
the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the
organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,--how
by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their
orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and
the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.

They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its
modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had
any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a
Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had
copied Newton's description of the mechanism of the heavens.

The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true
scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,--the best way of
their age,--those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of
Nature,"--and then by way of afterthought,--"and of Nature's God." And
they constructed a government as they would h