ave constructed an
orrery,--to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a
variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of
gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the
efficacy of "checks and balances."

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a
living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under
the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It
is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its
functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its
organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary,
its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response
to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of
purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men,
with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of
specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is
indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government
without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and
action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact,
whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political
constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a
living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must
develop.

All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when
"development," "evolution," is the scientific word--to interpret the
Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is
recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

* * * * *

Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of
Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell
against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom
that is going on to-day.

The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.
It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms
into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for
the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the
circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an
eminently practical document, me