It can defend the spirit of individualism. It must champion the human soul in its God-given right to exercise freely the faculties of mind and body. We must defend the right to work against those who would either destroy or degrade it. We must defend the right of every man, not only to join with others in protecting his interests, whether he is a brain worker or a hand worker--for without the right of combination the individual would often be the victim of giant forces--but we must vindicate the equal right of an individual, if he so wills, to depend upon his own strength. The tendency of group morality to standardize man--and thus reduce all men to the dead level of an average mediocrity--is one that the law should combat. Its protection should be given to those of superior skill and diligence, who ask the due rewards of such superiority. Any other course, to use the fine phrase of Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural, is to "take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned." Of this spirit one of the noblest expressions is the Constitution of the United States. That Magna Charta has not wholly escaped the destructive tendencies of a mechanical age. It was framed at the very end of the pastoral-agricultural age and at a time when the spirit of individualism was in full flower. The hardy pioneers who, with their axes, made straight the pathway of an advancing civilization, were sturdy men who need not be undervalued to us of the mechanical age. The "prairie schooner," which met the elemental forces of Nature with the proud challenge: "Pike's Peak or bust," produced as fine a type of manhood as the age which travels either in Mr. Ford's "fliver" or the more luxurious Rolls-Royce. The Constitution was framed in the period that marked the passing of the primitive age and the dawn of the day of the machine. Watt had recently discovered the potency of steam vapour as a motive power; but its only use at first was for pumping water out of the mines. When the framers of the Constitution met in high convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a Connecticut Yankee, John Fitch, was then also working in Philadelphia upon his steamboat; but twenty years were to pass before the prow of the _Clermont_ was to part the waters of the Hudson, and nearly a half century before transportation was to be revolutionized by the utilization of Watt's invention in the locomotive. Of the wonders of the steamship, the railroad, the telegraphic cable, the wireless, the gasoline engine, and a thousand other mechanical miracles, the framers of the American Constitution did not even dream.