days for English liberty when Coke, on the one hand, and Lord Bacon, on the other hand, contended for and against the authority of the judges to be final arbiters of constitutional law. The story of this struggle, as told by Gardiner in the third volume of his monumental history, is one of the most significant chapters in the great drama of the rise of the English people as a self-governing commonwealth.

Bacon contended that lawyers, like clergymen, with their passion for logical refinement and their lack of personal experience of the everyday life of men, are. not the proper stuff of which to make broad-minded statesmen. Be this as it may, Bacon carried his point against Coke. The legislative branch of the government, instead of the judicial, was made in England the dominant power. The consequences are familiar to all. The British Parliament is the legal sovereign in the United Kingdom. The people can there express their will with a directness which in America is altogether impossible. In actual practice the legislative body has become a sober and responsible body, and for the all-sufficient reason that the necessity of assuming responsibility creates the sense of responsibility as a habit of the human mind.

This elementary and well-demonstrated moral fact is a sufficient reply to those who say that, while we do indeed desire and believe in government by the people, we should guard against popular clamor and mob action, as zealously as we guard against despotism. But there is another answer also, which in its turn is sufficient and conclusive. Popular government should be, in the long run it must be, an expression of the sober second thought. But it must be the sober second thought of the people themselves. The thought of nine justices, whether it be first thought or second thought or third thought is no more popular government than is the ukase of the czar of the Russians.

People Should Amend Constitution When

Necessary.

The constitution provides for amendment by the people acting through Congress and the state legislatures in a prescribed way, or through a constitutional convention. It does not provide for overt and formal amendment by the Supreme Court. Powers not granted to the federal government are,

as the letter of the constitution says, reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

How, then, has it happened that as a matter of practical fact the powers not delegated to the federal government, including the power to amend the constitution, have come more and more to be exercised in effect, although, of course, never openly and confessedly by the federal Supreme Court?

The answer, I think, is this: No nation on earth can go on forever living according to the letter of a scheme of government laid down for it by its ancestors. In a thousand ways the conditions of existence change, and life is a never ceasing adjustment of the organism to its environment. A living nation expands. Its industries multiply. Its commerce goes forth to the ends of the earth. Its wealth increases. Its population multiplies from generation to generation and becomes more complex in its ethnic composition. The structure of society becomes differentiated. Conflicting class interests arise, and a myriad of questions of public policy spring forth of which the fathers in their day and generation never so much as dreamed.

The United States has been no exception to this law of growth. Nay, more than any other nation of which history has made record, it has exemplified it. And yet, with a reverence for the past well-nigh unexampled, it has attempted to limit its own freedom of political and legal action by the letter of a written constitution, drafted for it by men who never in their wildest imaginings foresaw a locomotive or a steamship, to say nothing of an electric dynamo or a wireless message across the seas. Only twice have the people exercised their constitution-amending power.

Herein, I think, lies the true cause of conditions which I can but regard as unfortunate. It has been impossible for this nation to live and to grow within the strict letter of the federal constitution as it stands written today. Therefore, since the people have neither adequately amended their constitution, nor been able to live within its provisions, the justices of the Supreme Court have had opportunity to make the phrases of our fundamental law "more elastic than rubber." that the people might find room within them for mere civilized existence.

What is more, as time goes on this process

may be carried far beyond any former or present experimenting. We are but at the beginning of those developments of our national life which will call for far-reaching changes of public policy. It will not do to forget that that theory of government which assumes that the functions of government should be few, simple and strictly hedged about with safeguards against precipitate action, grew up in days when the relations between the government and the individual were themselves simple and relatively few.

Political society in those days consisted of the government and natural individuals. Economic society consisted of individuals making contracts one with another, and of simple business partnerships. Economic society of today consists chiefly of gigantic artificial beings the corporations, juristic personalities, having many of the rights and some of the obligations of natural individuals. These legal beings have been created by the state, and it is utterly, it is appallingly, preposterous to extend to them that theory and practice of government which rests on the assumption that governments should interfere as liftle as possible in the affairs of natural individuals.

That theory is sound. The democracy that ignores it, or contends against it, is destined to fail. We have in fact in our land disregarded it already and altogether too far. Our state governments, in particular, have gone to an absurd length in their paternalistic control of the private conduct of natural individuals. But while thus exercising an unwise authority over adult individual life, they have neglected much too long to take up and responsibly discharge their obvious duty of prescribing and controlling the conduct of their own begotten children-the vast business corporations.

There is, I believe, but one way out of our difficulties. It consists in frankly recognizing the fact that we must make our constitutional frame of government flexible and adaptable to changing conditions; and if we are to be indeed a democratic people, the alterations in the fundamental law must

be made by the people themselves, and not by their judges.

I am in entire sympathy with those who hold that loose constructions of the constitution are bad constitutional law. I believe that Senator Knox and Mr. Justice Brewer have been entirely right in their contention that the only constitutional way in which the power reserved to the people can be exercised by the people, is through the process of constitutional amendment.

Process of Amendment Difficult.

The process of amendment, however, as all our experience has shown, is extremely difficult, and apparently it is only under an extraordinary pressure of events that it can be achieved. Here, then, is a problem to exercise the profoundest thought of the most gifted of our broadest minded statesmen. The obvious and the imperative need arising out of our irresistible national development is of one constitutional amendment which shall make the process of amendment itself henceforth far simpler, far easier to achieve than it now is. If we fail to obtain it, one of two consequences must, as I believe, inevitably follow. Either, adhering to a strict construction, we shall so paralyze the arm of government to deal with new developments of our national life that we shall be unable to resist a lawless kind of business activity, and the consequences will be economically, morally, and politically disastrous; or, we shall depart farther and farther from the rule of strict construction, until our constitution has ceased to bear even assemblance of the scheme of law and government created in 1788, and we shall have whatever body of constitutional law approves itself to the minds of the small group of justices constituting the Supreme Court of the United States.

When either of these things has happened, it will be logically in order to ask whether we are still a democratic people; but it may also, perchance, have become impertinent then to put the question and lese majeste to debate it.

D

MUNICH, January 4, 1908. URING recent years the German working classes have secured a remarkable improvement of their economic condition. The improvement goes hand in hand with the progress of the trade unions which strive to secure and maintain the highest possible rate of wages. The unions have been successful not only in this respect, but also in considerably reducing the hours of labor. The unions seek to enlist public sympathy where they can, and to educate their own members in favor of shorter hours. By the efforts of the unions six and more hours per week have been taken off, in most trades, within the last 10 years.

A report issued by the General Federation of Trade Unions of Germany shows the success which trade unions attained in 1906. In all parts of Germany 8,543 movements for the change of existing conditions of labor occurred during the year 1906 (as compared with 5,659 movements in 1905); 62,780 establishments with 1,260,571 persons employed were affected (1,150,656 in 1905). Of the total number of workmen taking part in the 8,543 movements, 339,469 obtained reductions of the hours of labor and 691,703 increases in regular wages. Moreover, higher wages for overtime were obtained in 2,246 cases, increased pay for night work, etc., in 2,109 cases; in 68 cases piece-work has been abolished, in 98 cases working rules have been improved, in 149 cases the victimization of workmen was prevented. In more than 2,000 cases other benefits were secured. The figures relate to disputes in which a stoppage of work was involved as well as to disputes settled by peaceable means.

The average reduction of working time was three and one-half hours per week for every person affected; the success in this regard equals that of the previous year, while the number of workmen obtaining reductions of the hours of labor was 60 per cent greater. The average weekly increase in

The largest number of wage-earners had their working time shortened in the metal and shipbuilding industries; in this group of industries 81,666 persons obtained shorter hours of labor, amounting in the aggregate to 317,252 hours per week. Next to metal working and shipbuilding came the textile, clothing, and leather industries, with 81,156 persons taking part in reductions of the working time, the aggregate amount of reduction being 291,681 hours per week.

In regard to the number of wage-earners who obtained higher wages, the building trades rank first with 229,321 persons, gaining a total increase of 497,542 marks per week; in the metal and shipbuilding industries the total increase of wages of the affected 122,945 persons amounted to 222,848 marks weekly.