The problem of constructing such a sovereignty was the problem which Washington solved, temporarily at least, without violence.  He prevailed not only because of an intelligence and elevation of character which enabled him to comprehend, and to persuade others, that, to attain a common end, all must make sacrifices, but also because he was supported by a body of the most remarkable men whom America has ever produced.  Men who, though doubtless in a numerical minority, taking the country as a whole, by sheer weight of ability and energy, achieved their purpose.

Yet even Washington and his adherents could not alter the limitations 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.