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.

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.