“As I look, Mr. President, at present conditions in our country, there are indications to my mind of great danger to our institutions. It seems to me I observe a tendency in the minds of the people to forget how vital to their perpetuation is the preservation of all the wise limitations which our forefathers ordained. It seems to me that there is a growing forgetfulness of the fact that the liberty which our fathers founded was not license but a liberty restrained by law; that the government which they established was one of limited powers and divided authority, national and local, each fulfilling their separate functions and each intended to move in their allotted sphere like the orbs of the Sidereal universe, thus securing the plenitude of local rights whilst at the same time obtaining national power and authority, not unlimited, but confined to its allotted orbit. “I say that it seems to me there is a tendency to forget these things because it is observable at the present time that wherever an evil obtains which needs remedying the tendency of the public mind is to attribute the evil, not to a mistaken administration, but to the existence of some one of those great safeguards upon the preservation of which our institutions depend. So also it seems to me it is observable that there is a great tendency in the public mind, whenever it is deemed that a wrong requires remedy, to grow restive under the restraints imposed by constitutional limitations, to regard them as antiquated or obsolete, and thus seek to redress the wrong without regard to those limitations, forgetful of the great truth that whatever may be the temporary good to be accomplished by a disregard of the fundamental limitations of our Constitution, such good is insignificant in comparison with the untold harm which must result from overthrowing the very foundations upon which our government rests and by the adhering to which alone it can endure. “Again, it seems to me that this tendency in the mind of the people generally finds manifestation in the exertion of the powers of government. There seems to me to be a growing tendency to chafe at the limitations on power which the Constitution imposes; to seek to accomplish some temporary good by means deemed to be the most direct, wholly without reference to the question whether the resort to such means will conflict with or set at naught those essential limitations upon power which the Constitution was expressly adopted to secure.