Mr. Harding as President, Mr. Taft as Chief Justice, the agricultural bloc, the enfeebled Congress, the one million or so Democratic majority which becomes in four years a seven-million Republican majority, are only manifestations. The reality is the man, many millions strong, whose mental state produces the symptoms at Washington. It will be profitable to examine the content of his mind as it was in those days before momentous decisions had to be made about daylight saving, and as it is today when he hesitates between saving daylight and saving the clock, and perhaps decides to save both. I can not better describe his political consciousness as it was than by saying that it contained three governments--the government of the clock, the government of the clock-winders, and the government of those who lived by the clock as religiously minded by the clock-winders. It was an orderly age, beautifully sure of itself, and the area of these three governments was nicely delimited. There was only a small place for the third of these governments. For the purposes of more common understanding I shall sometimes refer to the government of the clock as the government of Progress, and the government of the clock-winders as the government of business, and to the third government as the government at Washington. Before the war the American was sure that with each tick of the clock the world grew richer and better, especially richer. Progress went inevitably on and on. It never turned backward or rested. Its mechanical process relieved man of many responsibilities. No one would think of touching the mechanism; turning back the hands of the clock might rob us of some boon that was intended in the beginning whose moment of arrival might be lost by interfering with God's Time. Born on a continent which only a few years before was a wilderness but which now was the richest and one of the finest civilizations on the earth, the American could not fail to believe in progress. The visible evidences of it were on every hand. His father had been a poor immigrant seeking the mere chance to live; he was a farmer possessed of many acres, a business man who had an increasing income already in five figures, a rising young attorney, or physician. Even from generation to generation everything got better. The past had had its unhappy moments. The American looked back at the past mainly to measure how far he had come and to guess how far moving forward at a geometrical ratio of increased speed he would go in the not distant future. History flattered him.