wire and carries it to all places.  We have the telephone, an invention which makes it possible for a man to live on a back street and be a next-door neighbour to boulevards; and we have the trolley, the modern reduction of the private carriage to its lowest terms, so that any man for five cents can have as much carriage power as Napoleon with all his chariots.  We have the phonograph, an invention which gives a man a thousand voices; which sets him to singing a thousand songs at the same time to a thousand crowds; which makes it possible for the commonest man to hear the whisper of Bismarck or Gladstone, to unwind crowds of great men by the firelight of his own house.  We have the elevator, an invention for making the many as well off as the few, an approximate arrangement for giving first floors to everybody, and putting all men on a level at the same price—­one more of a thousand instances of the extraordinary manner in which the mechanical arts have devoted themselves from first to last to the Constitution of the United States.  While it cannot be said of many of these tools of existence that they are beautiful now, it is enough to affirm that when they are perfected they will be beautiful; and that if we cannot make beautiful the things that we need, we cannot expect to make beautiful the things that we merely want.  When the beauty of these things is at last brought out, we shall have attained the most characteristic and original and expressive and beautiful art that is in our power.  It will be unprecedented because it will tell unprecedented truths.  It was the mission of ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it may be said to be in a general way the mission of our modern art to express the beautiful in endless change, the movement of masses, coming to its sublimity and immortality at last by revealing the beauty of the things that move and that have to do with motion, the bringing of all things and of all souls together on the earth.

The fulfillment of the word that has been written, “Your valleys shall be exalted, and your mountains shall be made low,” is by no means a beautiful process.  Democracy is the grading principle of the beautiful.  The natural tendency the arts have had from the first to rise from the level of the world, to make themselves into Switzerlands in it, is finding itself confronted with the Constitution of the United States—­a Constitution which, whatever it may be said to mean in the years to come, has placed itself on record up to the present time, at least, as standing for the tableland.

The very least that can be granted to this Constitution is that it is so consummate a political document that it has made itself the creed of our theology, philosophy, and sociology; the principle of our commerce and industry; the law of production, education, and journalism; the method of our life; the controlling characteristic and the significant force in our literature; and the thing our religion and our arts are about.