The history of the Convention furnishes abundant evidence that there were acts of weakness as well as acts of valor; pusillanimity and courage; selfishness and patriotism; chicane and statesmanship; and that, after the Constitution was completed, there was a great deal of confusion and discussion before it was adopted. Still, the controlling spirit of these fathers in thus welding the freedom of America upon the best qualities of the Constitution of Great Britain, was a spirit characterized by sagacity, courage, fidelity, and statesmanship. One of the best evidences to us of the prevalence of these qualities, is to be found in the prominence which the American Constitution holds in the eyes of the whole of Western civilization, and in its growing influence upon the development of European, and especially English, thought. The manner in which this Constitution. has remained in substantial congruity with our own subsequent development; in which it has restrained where restraint was necessary, and enlarged where freedom grew; the manner in which it has borne the nation through the crisis of a civil war, has not only proven the sum of the great wisdom thus exercised, but it also affords warrant for the belief that we shall be enabled, with moderate structural changes, to adjust and assimilate to it the phenomenal activities of this and coming generations.

In some respects no time was ever more propitious for affording a measure of the stature of political liberty than the post-Revolutionary period of Amer

ica, that period during which the Supreme Court was called upon to define the Constitution under practical tests. The lessons which were studied came from two certain opposing tendencies. The French Revolution had just illustrated the excesses of anarchy. The French nation, having been oppressed for centuries by monarchical restraints, had just broken all bounds. The political pendulum had swung from the extreme of despotism to the extreme of ochlocracy. The rabble arrayed the Demon of License in the robes of the Goddess of Liberty. The English nation contemplated with the utmost horror the conditions which thus prevailed in France. English legislation was for a time completely paralyzed. The excesses of the Reign of Terror called into being a feeling of revulsion against all freedom. It came to be assumed that the freedom of the masses inevitably tended toward the unbridled excesses of the mob. It was a most fortunate circumstance, at this time, that the interpretation of our Constitution was in the hands of men of profound legal attainments, historic wisdom, and judicial temper.

Addressing themselves to the problem of adapting the Constitution to practice, they studied the two extremes which immediate history thus afforded them. As causes arose that involved questions of constitutional construction, they defined certain essential qualities of liberty by clearly drawing the line between unbridled excess on the one hand and

the undue restraints of hereditary government on the other. Thus, through a long series of decisions, they familiarized the people with the political principle that, whilst with the people rested the sovereignty, in public and individual self-restraint lay the true means of guarding and preserving that sovereignty.'

Let us now briefly examine the industrial law of society, in its fundamental operation, as related to this liberty, in order that we may endeavor, from such examination, to construct the precise definition of the qualities of American political and industrial liberty.

We may set it down as a primal fact, that activity is a normal and necessary condition of the human race; and as corollaries from this fact, that this activity is best secured when each individual is engaged in that particular occupation which most tends to develop his industrial faculties; and that the highest incentives to this activity are to be found in the right of each individual to get, gather, hold, and, with certain limitations which I shall presently notice, to bequeath property."

1 Had it not been for slavery, the fathers of the republic would have gone within one step of defining the ultimate of political and industrial liberty. But the sin of slavery cannot be charged to Jefferson. He employed all his influence for the extirpation of the slave-trade and the deportation of the slaves. He sought to incorporate in the Declaration of Independence a clause in which he truly charged the English government with the responsibility for the African slave-trade; and it was his highest boast, forty-five days before his death, that he had ever thus used his efforts in behalf of freedom. (See Jefferson to James Heaton, May 20, 1826.)

2 Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his treatise entitled "The Sphere and Duties of Government," strikes the keynote of individuality in one sen

The acquisitions of each man represent his struggles, his risk, his skill, prudence, foresight, and abstinence; his gains are for his family, his old age, and for his children's beginnings. In the confidence and security with which he can hold and bequeath property lie the great incentives for the struggle to acquire it. It is in order to make these incentives complete that the individual may bequeath his acquired property to those who come within the bounds of his natural affection; it is to prevent the lessening of these incentives that the individual cannot create indefinite perpetuities, which would tend to interfere with the free activities of subsequent generations. In a word, the incentives of the acquisition of property and the security of its possession are things of paramount importance, because they constitute the great mainspring of all industrial endeavor; and when these are thus guaranteed to every one equally, the most constant activity is thereby promoted, and the largest sum of human activity follows. It is this variation and diffusion of freedom which produce the greatest sum of human

tence. He says: “The end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole"; that, therefore, the object “toward which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow-men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality and power of development"; that for this there are two requisites, "freedom and a variety of situations"; and that from the union of these arise "individual vigor and manifold diversity." ("The Sphere and Duties of Government," from the German of Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, pp. 11-13.)

energy, the greatest sum of human skill, the greatest sum of human benefits, and their most equitable distribution. Moreover, there can be conceived no greater moral stimulus than that which results from the daily employment of each citizen, with each day's result of labor possessed and held in a sense of security. In the free operation of these incentives it is necessary to note that the individual is the chief object of nature's solicitude: the individual as a unit distinguished from the number. Inherent in these incentives lies the vivid recognition of the equality of right of each of these units before the law, before the popular power, and before any power exercised by any aggregation or delegation of the units, whether such delegation be for the enlargement of commercial convenience or for civil and industrial government. The unvarying prerequisite is that the power must be exercised for the equal commercial convenience and for the equal government of each one of the units. There is no possible place for the least phase of favoritism in the operation of this principle. The moment a political privilege of any kind is created, freedom recedes just so far as the privilege operates. The highest attribute of this political freedom, therefore, is that it is an equation, in which each one of the constituent units has an exact and equal quantum of political right. The incentives of acquisition and possession which thus belong to political liberty are not mere incidents or accidents; they are in and of it essentially, and by