and failure, are seldom touched upon.  The necessary courage—­or perhaps temerity—­is lacking.  What is needed is such a clear seeing of conditions, and such an approach, as manifested themselves in the Constitutional Convention of the United States, for in spite of the many compromises that were in the end necessary to placate a public opinion not untouched by prejudice, superstition and selfishness, the great document—­and even more the records of the debates—­still brilliantly set forth both the clear-seeing and the lofty attitude that characterized the Convention.  Had these men been gathered together today, even the same men, they would frame a very different document, for they took conditions and men as they were, and, with an indestructible hope to glorify their common sense, they produced a masterpiece.  It is in the same spirit that we must approach our problem of today.

Now in considering the situation that confronts us, we find certain respects in which either the methods are bad, or the results, or both.  There is no unanimity in this criticism, indeed I doubt if any two of us would agree on all the items in the indictment, though we all might unite on one or two.  I can only give my own list for what it is worth.  In the first place we, in common with all the nations, have drifted into imperialism of a gross scale and illiberal, even tyrannical working.  We could hardly do otherwise for such has been the universal tendency for more than an hundred years.  By constant progression municipal governments have absorbed into themselves matters that in decency, and with any regard for liberty, belong to the individual.  Simultaneously our state governments have followed the same course, infringing even on the just prerogatives of the towns and cities, while, more than all, the national government has robbed the states, the cities and the citizens of what should belong to them, until at last we have an imperial, autocratic, inquisitorial, and largely irresponsible government at Washington that is the one supreme political fact; we are no longer a Federal Republic but an Imperialism, in which is centralized all the authority inherent in the one hundred and ten millions of our population and from which a constantly diminishing stream of what is practically devolved authority, trickles down through state and city to the individual in the last instance—­if it gets there at all!  This I believe to be absolutely and fatally wrong.  In the first place, human society cannot function at this abnormal scale, it is outside the human scale, for in spite of our pride and insolence there are limits on every hand to what man can do.  In the second place, I conceive it to be absolutely at variance with any principle of republicanism or democracy or even of free monarchy.  It is at one only with the imperialism of Egypt, Babylon, Rome and the late Empire of Germany.  In a free monarchy, a republic, or a democracy, the pyramid of political organism stands, not on its point but broad-based