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,

will make sure that their operation shall be for the equal benefit of the entire community. The public-school system has not only extended over the whole Nation, as it did not at first, but has undertaken all forms of education from the kindergarten to the university, and is accompanied by public libraries in practically all centres of population. The public health is seen to be something more than the health of individuals, or, at least, it is seen that the health of individuals cannot be secured by individualistic enterprise. We have, therefore, Health Boards, beginning in our great cities, extending throughout our States, and now, unless I am greatly mistaken, soon to be organized in a bureau of the Federal Government, for the purpose of compelling obedience to sanitary law and stamping out epidemics. Even our amusements and recreations are made a public concern, and in our cities, towns, and even smaller villages, parks are provided, playgrounds for the children, and bands of music for the summer evenings. In some cases these are provided by political organizations, in others by voluntary organization, but in either case by a common and coöperative effort.

These changes have been accompanied by another change. The increasing complexity of modern civilization forces upon us, whether we

will or no, an increasing complexity in our government. The prime function of government is to protect persons and property, and the four fundamental rights of persons and property have never been better defined than in the four moral laws of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. The enforcement of these laws in a modern community with the heterogeneous population which America contains means something very different from the enforcement of these laws in the wilderness, where they were first proclaimed.

The law, Thou shalt not kill, means not only adequate protection of the individual from the assassin or the mob, and of the free laborer from the pistol, the dynamite, or the savage blow of the striking laborer or his ally; it means supervision by the Government of our food-supplies to prevent adulterations perilous to health; protection of the life of little children from the greed which sends them into life-destroying industries; protection of the wives and mothers from insistent demands of industry which destroy their motherhood and rob their children and their husbands of their care and companionship; from the peril to life involved in tenement-house sweat-shops; from the corrupting of our water-supply by turning our