embody an old usage would have been transformed in ten years by the popular will into something that did. The reason the Constitution of the United States is the most remarkable document in existence is that it contained so little of novelty. The election of some officers and the appointment of the rest, that was what the people were used to. That is democracy. There is of course no such thing as a pure democracy, or a pure monarchy. Every government is in practice the outcome of forces of which a very small fraction are expressed in its constitution and laws. A constitution is a profession of faith, a summary written on a bulletin board, and so far good. The United States had this advantage in starting upon her career, that the bulletin was a very accurate summary of existing customs, and was in itself an inspiring proof of the virtue of the people. We are driven into admiring the Colonists as among the most enlightened of their kind. It is true that the revolution was conducted, and the Constitution adopted by the activity of a small minority. But this is true of all revolutions. The point is that the leaders represented sense and virtue. The people followed. The moment the scheme was launched it became the sport of the elements. In the North a trading bourgeoisie grew up under it. In the South a slave-holding oligarchy, a society so fantastically out of touch with the modern world that it seems like something left over from the times before Christ, found no difficulty in making use of the forms of Democracy. During the half century that followed, these two societies became so hostile to each other that conflict was inevitable, and there ensued a death-grapple in four years of war, a war to extinction. At the end of the war no trace of the oligarchy remained upon the face of the earth. And yet these forms of government survived and began to operate immediately, under new auspices of course, deflected by new passions, showing new shapes of distortion, yet ideally the same. The only common element between the north and the south was the reverence for these forms of government. Meanwhile civilization had been creeping westward in a margin of frontier life, conducted under these forms. Behind this moved a belt of farming and village life, at war with the backwoods ideals, but using the same forms of government. Then arose the railroad era and tore millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything, ruled everybody--still under these forms. Let us examine them.