Were all other evidence lacking, the inference that radical changes are at hand might be deduced from the past.  In the experience of the English-speaking race, about once in every three generations a social convulsion has occurred; and probably such catastrophes must continue to occur in order that laws and institutions may be adapted to physical growth.  Human society is a living organism, working mechanically, like any other organism.  It has members, a circulation, a nervous system, and a sort of skin or envelope, consisting of its laws and institutions.  This skin, or envelope, however, does not expand automatically, as it would had Providence intended humanity to be peaceful, but is only fitted to new conditions by those painful and conscious efforts which we call revolutions.  Usually these revolutions are warlike, but sometimes they are benign, as was the revolution over which General Washington, our first great “Progressive,” presided, when the rotting Confederation, under his guidance, was converted into a relatively excellent administrative system by the adoption of the Constitution.

Taken for all in all, I conceive General Washington to have been the greatest man of the eighteenth century, but to me his greatness chiefly consists in that balance of mind which enabled him to recognize when an old order had passed away, and to perceive how a new order could be best introduced.  Joseph Story was ten years old in 1789 when the Constitution was adopted; his earliest impressions, therefore, were of the Confederation, and I know no better description of the interval just subsequent to the peace of 1783, than is contained in a few lines in his dissenting opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case:—­

“In order to entertain a just view of this subject, we must go back to that period of general bankruptcy, and distress and difficulty (1785)....  The union of the States was crumbling into ruins, under the old Confederation.  Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce were at their lowest ebb.  There was infinite danger to all the States from local interests and jealousies, and from the apparent impossibility of a much longer adherence to that shadow of a government, the Continental Congress.  And even four years afterwards, when every evil had been greatly aggravated, and civil war was added to other calamities, the Constitution of the United States was all but shipwrecked in passing through the state conventions."[1]

This crisis, according to my computation, was the normal one of the third generation.  Between 1688 and 1765 the British Empire had physically outgrown its legal envelope, and the consequence was a revolution.  The thirteen American colonies, which formed the western section of the imperial mass, split from the core and drifted into chaos, beyond the constraint of existing law.  Washington was, in his way, a large capitalist, but he was much more.  He was not only a wealthy planter, but he was an engineer, a traveller, to an extent a manufacturer, a politician, and a soldier, and he saw that, as a conservative, he must be “Progressive” and raise the law to a power high enough to constrain all these thirteen refractory units.  For Washington understood that peace does not consist in talking platitudes at conferences, but in organizing a sovereignty strong enough to coerce its subjects.