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mands and power to enforce obedience to them. This power may be that of an armed force, then the government is a military government; it may be a traditional or inherited power exercised by a class and resting upon tradition, then it is an hereditary aristocracy; it may be that of a selected body of office-holders intrusted by long custom with practically irresponsible power, then it is a bureaucracy; it may be the power of concentrated wealth exercised through political forms that may be either monarchic, oligarchic, aristocratic, or democratic. Then, whatever the political forms, the government is a plutocracy.

To these historic forms of government our fathers attempted to add another-self-government. It was founded upon three fundamental principles, the truth of which was tacitly assumed rather than explicitly expressed. They were:

First, that the mass of men are better able to govern themselves than the few are to govern them; that the perils from the ignorance of the governed are less than the perils from the selfishness of the governors.

Second, that therefore men should be left free to manage their own affairs, and only their own affairs; that therefore each man should govern himself in respect to those things that concern only himself, and each community should

govern

itself in those things which concern only itself. Hence grew up local self-government and the Federal system: the town government for the town, the municipal government for the city, the county government for the county, the State government for the State, and, finally, the Federal Government for those National interests which concern the people of all the towns, cities, counties, and States. Hence the provision of the Constitution that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." 1

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Third, that men are not born able to govern themselves as fish are to swim, or birds are to fly, but that all men have a dominant capacity for self-government; that they must be, and they can be, educated; hence the public-school system.

Thus was the new Nation born, inspired by a new ideal, and founded on a new political faith — faith in humanity.

But it needed education in a school of conflict. The Declaration of Independence was deemed, both in the South and in the North, to be applicable only to the white race. Slavery, which both

1 It is true that this is a subsequent Amendment to the Constitution, but there is no doubt that it expresses the spirit of the original document, and of those who framed that document.

in the South and in the North our fathers expected would gradually disappear, grew with our growth and strengthened with our strength. It created in the South what may be called a feudal democracy, a type of aristocracy existing under democratic forms. The war between the two ideals of political life, the Southern and the Northern, established for the Republic two principles: first, the doctrine that all governments exist for the benefit of the governed is as applicable to the government of the negro as to the government of the white man; second, a government founded on self-government is not weak but strong strong enough to meet successfully what was perhaps the greatest revolt against government which the world has ever seen. This war at home was followed by one between autocracy and democracy, between the Land of the Inquisition and the Land of the Public School. As the Confederates had established the power of the Federal Government within the borders of the Republic, so the Spanish War established the power of the Federated Republic among the governments of the world. If it did not make the Republic a world power, it at least won for that world power a world recognition.

Meanwhile, the country has grown with unprecedented growth in territory from thirteen

feeble colonies along the Atlantic Coast to a Republic overspreading half a continent; in population from three or four millions to eighty millions; in wealth from poverty to one of the richest communities in the world. Its educational equipment includes a public-school system which is certainly the largest, and, unless Germany be an exception, the best in Christendom, supplemented by private schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools not surpassed by any in the world; its material equipment of railway, telegraph, telephone, and the like puts it among the foremost nations in the march of human progress; its moral ideals, exemplified in its various social and educational reforms, and in its free institutions of religion, prove the self-educative value of self-government; and its international influence is seen in the effect of its ideals and institutions upon other lands, which have adopted since the birth of America its representative houses of Legislature, its popular suffrage, its public schools, its free assemblies, and its free press.

Meanwhile, this ideal of self-government has been undergoing a change which is none the less revolutionary because it has been growth, and hence unconscious; a change from a government of self-governing individuals into a self-govern

ing community. We have learned that the interest of the whole is more than the sum of the interests of all the individuals; and that the interests of all individuals can only be secured by their common recognition of the interest of the whole. Some of the changes which have taken place in my own lifetime may serve to illustrate this peaceful revolution.

The private penny posts which were once operated in some of our great cities exist no longer; all epistolary communications between the members of this great community are conveyed for them by their Federal Government. The banking, which was at first a purely private enterprise, is a purely private enterprise no longer; as one great financier once said to me, "the United States is the greatest banking concern in the world"; and all so-called private banks are so brought into affiliation with the United States Government and under its regulation and control that the whole banking system possesses a real, though not a strictly organic unity. Our highways, because of the invention of steam and railways, are no longer open highways on which each man is free to travel when and as he will, but are great enterprises carried on by combinations between labor and capital, and now under Government control, which, there is reason to believe,

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