The greatest historic expression of American radicalism has thus become the altar of the conservatives. To the unlettered man it may seem strange that a Supreme Court of elderly radicals will not allow Congress to forbid child-labour because of their loyalty to an 18th-century limitation of the federal government, presumably in the interest of freedom and humanity. To workmen voting for the eight-hour day the language of Jefferson did not seem hostile--they were struggling to pursue happiness in a way that he must have approved. And yet it is the sacred “right” of contract which deprived them, as voters, of the right to legislate for shorter hours. Workmen using their collective economic power to gain industrial freedom are met by a shower of injunctive denials, based chiefly on that same right of contract. In order to stay any further liberation of the human body and spirit, judges and officials and industrial barons have only to invoke the phrases of freedom thrown out against an ancient despotism. They have only to point out that freedom as defined abstractly over a hundred years ago forbids practical freedom to-day. Frozen radicalism of the past chills and destroys the new roots of American life. Some appreciation of this state of affairs underlies the prevailing tendency to believe that all new radicalism has a foreign origin. It is, indeed, part of the best nationalistic tradition to attribute subversive doctrines to foreigners. This is the habit in every country. But in the United States the habit is perhaps more deep-seated than elsewhere. Americans are by definition free and equal; if then any one talks or acts as if he were not free and equal, he must have been born somewhere else. The American Government, being not a faulty product of human growth, but a new creation sprung perfect out of the ineffable minds of the Fathers, is unassailable; if any one assails it, he cannot know it, and must be subjected to courses in English and Civics (Americanization) until he recognizes its perfection. Treason in this country is not simple treason to a ruler, to a class, or to a system as elsewhere; it is an act of sacrilege, by one uninitiated, upon a religious mystery.