When first we shall hear this 1917 resurrection of the Tory concept that government is master and Americans are “subjects,” that government is the state and we are its assets, we shall naturally be astounded and indignant that even a few inhabitants should still retain what Madison called “the impious doctrine” of the Old World, that people are made for governments, not governments for the people. Quickly, however, we shall become alarmed to find how wide-spread, among the “constitutional thinkers” of our own generation, is the complacent acceptance of the Tory concept and to learn that, when its application in any given instance injures a client of one of those constitutional thinkers, no matter how he may argue against the application in the particular instance, he neither knows nor uses for his client the fact that the Statute of ’76 repealed the doctrine on which Magna Charta rested, the Tory concept that government is the state and that we are its “subjects.” It will be difficult for us to understand these leaders of our generation. In addition to what we have just lived through with the early Americans, these leaders will have before them countless decisions of the Supreme Court, flatly contradicting the Tory concept on which all these leaders reason. “The concessions of Magna Charta were wrung from the King as guarantees against the oppressions and usurpations of his prerogatives.... The omnipotence of Parliament over the common law was absolute, even against common right and reason. The actual and practical security for English liberty against legislative tyranny was the power of a free public opinion represented by the Commons.” We are going to find many of _our_ leaders with the fixed Tory concept that there is in America a legislative government, unknown to the generation of Americans who created all government in America, and that this omnipotent government can do whatever it pleases, without any constitutional restraint, with _almost_ everything in America, including ourselves and our Constitution and our American government. Curiously enough, we are going to be told that the one thing, in which this omnipotent legislative government falls short of absolute omnipotence, has nothing to do with any individual human freedom, but is its inability to change the equal representation of every state in our Senate. It will be quite amazing to us to hear these men, not _proving_ this Tory concept but stating it as axiomatic American law and on it basing their every argument and audaciously claiming that our Supreme Court has no right even to consider whether it is so or not. But there will be something to alarm us even more. We will find _our_ other “constitutional thinkers,” by circumstances obliged to challenge some particular deduction from this Tory concept, without any knowledge of the invincible facts which challenge the concept itself. To most of these men it will be as if the Statute of ’76 had