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 have 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.

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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, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.  Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.