small fraction of the people to keep the remainder in constant agitation, and government shuddering at every irritable cough. They did not believe that it was the function of a Constitution to control personal habits or behavior. They did believe in responsible, representative government, virile but not oppressive, stable and uniform but not unchangeable, protecting majority and minority alike, and leaving it to the citizen to give bonds to conscience and that sense of duty which result in beauty of conduct and the uplifting of the soul.

For these reasons the Constitution is not a boulder of sandstone to be chipped and marred by the impatient chisels of over-ardent sciolists, but stands as a citadel of principles, a rock of defence in times of trouble, unshaken and sublime.

My Countrymen: We are what we are, because our Fathers were what they were. We can no more ignore or change our political parentage than we can ignore or change the physical structure of our continent, or the chemical and electrical qualities of the soil we tread or of the air we breathe. We have not been given the features of Caliban, the appetite of Moloch, the delirium of Saturn, nor the wickedness of Satan. We persecute no class; we throw no bombs; we seek no man's blood. We kindle no fires to scorch the stars of faith, humanity and justice. We forge chains for no man, but we will allow no man to forge chains for us. We dictate no creeds, but we will defend our own altars. The dragon of Bolshevism, with flaming eyes, poisonous fangs, flapping wings and cruel claws cannot cow us. We are human beings of that particular type of self-governing men known as Americans. Our form of government is American, and by the God of our Fathers American it shall remain.

THE ANCIENT PROBLEM.

BY

SIR AUCKLAND GEDDES,

BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

It is a pleasure, as it is a privilege, to be permitted to address you today. I thank you for the opportunity of saying some things which, though you have heard them many times before, should I think be said again and yet again. I know how wearying it is to listen to threadbare platitudes, so I shall not inflict more on you than the occasion demands or courtesy dictates. Our two nations have much in common, we know it and you know it; but we each have much that is not shared by the other. We are different peoples with interests which do not coincide in every detail: but we are also co-trustees of a heritage which I believe to be very precious, and it is of that heritage I wish to speak, because it has seemed to me that nationally we have each in our dealings with the other sometimes forgotten that we were responsible to the future, to our children and to theirs, for the safeguarding of a possession won at unbelievable cost in blood and tears.

With your permission I shall plunge into the blood-stained. past in an attempt to recall to you in outline the history of our heritage.

Humanity is very old. How old, it is naturally impossible precisely to say in terms of years, but speaking of ages and periods the mind gets some idea of the mass of its family tree. I do not mean of the evolutionary tree of humanity but of what I may, perhaps without risk of being misunderstood, call our postAdamite ancestry. Even modern man, men and women who, if we may judge by their bones and skulls and the size of their brains, would physically pass without remark in, perhaps would even adorn, the best society of London, Paris or New York, lived so long ago in Europe that it is impossible to say when, how or whence they came. If you will allow me to say that physically modern up-to-date men, handsome good-looking fellows like ourselves at the end of a fishing or hunting trip, a bit tanned by

wind and sun, a little lumpy from the attentions of mosquitoes, black flies and other members of the insect family, have existed in Europe for a quarter of a million years, I shall be quite happy though I think they have really been there much longer. As a European family, we have hardly changed in bodily structure for hundreds of thousands of years. I have myself found the skeleton of a girl of a remote antiquity whose hands and feet and ankles must have been as delicate and neat, whose face must have been as fair and oval as the neatest hands and feet and ankles and fair faces of today. And before those obvious blood relations of ours lived in Europe there were for hundreds of thousands of years tougher, rougher folk living there, with fine big brains and great artistic skill, who saw ice ages come and go and who, though they did not know it, saw the dawn of what geologists call the Pleistocene Period; they probably saw also the older Pliocene run its course, but that is not so certain. At the moment I wish merely to remind you that we humans have been at this business of living for a long time. If you will agree not to disagree with me when I say for a million years, I shall not press for any part of the other million and a half which some authorities might be persuaded to give me.

Let us agree then that our family tree is a million years long, perhaps I should say high, and here we are, you and I, grouped with some sixteen hundred million other human beings now alive, as the choice blossoms produced by all the efforts, all the struggles of the ages. I know no thought, not even the thought of God, more awe inspiring than that of this endless line of human ancestors who lived and loved, struggled and died. I am sure that in the main they were remarkably good fellows. There must be an immeasurable ocean of love and kindness, friendship and social service behind us. One would almost have thought that as a race we had been long enough here to have experienced all possible social arrangements and to have solved all problems of government and community life, and yet we know we have not. On the contrary we seem to have, at this moment, about as bad a mess in the making as any that our race has known. Why is it that, in spite of all its striving after good, the human race is still liable to seizure by paroxysms of hate and slaughter-lust like that which has just swept the world or like that which swept your country nearly sixty years ago?

Evidently there is at least one fundamental problem of human life concerning which we and our ancestors have equally failed to reach an agreed solution. Let me attempt to state what I believe that basal problem to be.

It is easy enough, I imagine, for one of the lower animals to live, to have a mate, to produce young, and to go the way of all flesh blindly believing, if there be any belief on the subject at all, that the numbers of the young will fully balance all casualties. But it is very difficult for a human animal that is physically not very strong, with a rather delicate mate who carries her babies. long in pregnancy, with offspring of few certain instincts and a long period of infantile helplessness, with above all a highly organized brain that is apt to get puzzled over the most difficult questions of right and wrong—it is very difficult for such an animal to adjust itself to an environment which in addition to what we may call the natural elements, the climate, the nature of the soil, or whatever it may be, includes also millions, nay, hundreds of millions, of equally puzzled, equally frightened human animals. As we unroll the scroll of history we see effort after effort made by men and communities of men to secure some reasonable adjustment between themselves and their environment, but man is so weak physically, and woman through her reproductive functions so much weaker, and human babies with their long infancy and slow maturity so much the weakest, that it is essential for human beings if they are to survive and prosper to live in some sort of community. Naturally every pair, man and woman, is fearful lest their children perish, so if by chance they find themselves alone they make use in haste of the first community organization they can devise or discover which will work somehow. At once the great problem arises-the problem which has baffled man throughout the millenniums and baffles us still.

It is the problem of Community Discipline with all that that implies, which is of course the sole justification for the existence of government. In the simplest community unit-the familythe father is obviously the disciplinarian and if any should question his right the palm of the paternal hand, or in more extreme cases the paternal club, has throughout the ages, until almost yesterday, provided the full, sufficient title. But man is mortal, and the grey hairs of the patriarch ultimately come with or with

out sorrow to the grave and his authority has to pass to some individual whose position is less securely founded. Then the family must either split into its component groups or in some mysterious way the patriarchal authority must pass without loss of majesty. I would weary you if I were to attempt to elaborate this part of my theme, but it is obvious, man's mind being what it is, that in time the patriarch must almost invariably become a sort of god in spiritual communism with his earthly representative. Thus arises tribal organization and if we wish to label it we must apply to this form of government the title Primitive Theocracy. Obviously in such a community no written laws are necessary; the tribal Father in heaven continues in theory to hand out through his earthly representative arbitrary edicts which come gradually to be tempered by custom and usage. Also obviously the bond which unites the tribe is an extended family tie, the chief being the head of the house in place of the patriarch. History shows that such a type of community organization is incompatible with a national life. Clans may unite in support of some vague idea of nationality, but their union is always temporary and usually short lived because each, being commanded by an absolute chief, must pursue his real or fancied wishes and interests.

Asia, in a manner we shall see in a moment, developed from the tribal organization the fully fledged Theocratic states such as Japan and China were. We know best the process of evolution of this typically Asiatic institution in the case of the Jews. In the Book of Judges we get a picture of the tribes of Israel vaguely conscious of some national unity because of their descent from Abraham, but fighting nevertheless with one another and subject because of their weakness and lack of union to periodic conquest by Philistines and Amalakites. Finally external pressure forced them to unite and Saul the Benjaminite became King of Israelfrankly and avowedly the representative on earth of the God of Israel in heaven. The theory was that Saul had to be obeyed because God spoke through him-rebellion against the king was as the sin of witchcraft, deliberate service of God's enemy the Devil. If the king tried to follow his own path and to give effect to his own ideas, God simply removed His guidance and inspiration and the king got into trouble, and the fact that he was in trouble was of course evidence that God was no longer