Individualism of the most uncompromising type was the basis of Herbert Spencer's political philosophy. He even thought (at one time) that the business of the post office would be better served if left to private initiative. But although the world has drifted a long way from the conceptions of government held by Spencer and his many disciples in England and America in 1885, there is still need, in fact, there is an increasingly urgent need, for straight thinking and plain speaking about the fundamental ideas that have hitherto marked off the AngloSaxons as a liberty-loving race. The drift is to paternalism in government. It has gained momentum year by year. It went racing during the Great War, and necessarily so; but the end of the war is far from restoring our individual freedom. Paternalism is an experiment in socialism, and the sinister end of socialism is either stagnation or the tyranny of the proletariat. Spencer saw the danger of over-legislation

and excessive government, and predicted what he called "the coming slavery," the servitude of the citizen to a paternalistic bureaucracy. Against it he raised his voice vehemently, and fought it with all the dialectic skill, convincing logic, and impressive speech that lay at his command. Therefore Mr. Truxton Beale has done his fellow countrymen a good service in collecting and editing those essays of Spencer's, all bearing upon the general subject, which make up this volume. And he has been fortunate in being able to accompany them with critical and in

terpretative comments by a number of eminent American publicists, including William Howard Taft, Charles W. Eliot, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, David Jayne Hill, Nicholas Murray Butler, E. H. Gary, Harlan F. Stone, and Augustus P. Gardner.

Both the essays and the comments upon them are chiefly concerned with the growth of officialism, the extension of official control over the private life and activities of the individual, and the consequent subordination of personal liberty to the dictates of a ruling class acting in the name of the state. They are wholesome reading for Americans in 1920, for many of the questions treated are, as Mr. Taft says, just as much alive today as they ever were. Radicals will scorn the book, and "new liberals" deride it. Frankly, it is a book for conservatives. But it is a day for conservatives to fortify themselves for the struggle by a recurrence to economic and sociologic truths, such as this book sets forth in good store; for if they fail, there will soon be not much of liberty left to conserve.

It is the cry of youth today, particularly of those who have fallen under radical influences, that "History has no lessons to teach us." But I have often thought how much better the people of this world would be able to travel their way if the accumulated experience of the past were turned to more frequently for information and guidance. This is not a recommendation to follow blindly the course of action of our predecessors, but rather, with clear and reasonable thought, to become informed as to what those who have gone before us have done in like circumstances with our own, to analyze their conduct in the light of later events, and to profit by their mistakes quite as much as by their successes. It may be a trite saying that history repeats itself, but it is none the less true. To become familiar

with the past is therefore a saving of ourselves for advanced and progressive thought and work, for no time is wasted in building up and fortifying

theories of cause and effect which have long since been examined and conclusively passed upon.

In material science there are few basic inventions. A completed, successful structure is almost invariably the result of intelligent additions to what has been done in the past. The inventor who fails to inform himself as to the "state of the art" wastes most of his time and is pretty sure to miss success; while the man who patiently acquires a knowledge of what has been accomplished in the field in which he

is working has the best and perhaps the only possible foundation for producing something worth while. And it is quite the same in political science. The startling advances of recent years in material science, new applications of the forces of nature to existing needs, have in no way altered man's nature or man's thinking power. A political problem may seem new, but somewhere in the pages of history is to be found a precedent that is helpful, or at least suggestive. The problem proves not to be so new as one ignorant of history might believe. Was it solved right? With the record before us we know better as to this than those who struggled with it at the time.

Never more than at present has there been such need for Americans to profit by the lessons of history and especially of their own. The old order of things appears to be disappearing. The world today is not the world of the Congress of Vienna. Republican ideas have even penetrated the Orient. A League of Nations to enforce peace is forming. Our own country is departing from its policy of isolation, sternly adhered to up to the time of the acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands. What American statesman of thirty or more years ago would have tolerated the thought of our official representatives taking part in a re-arrangement of the frontiers of European nations? These are days of serious political revolution. Are we to join in it, or shall we resist? No one of us has alone the authority to

decide; but each must share the responsibility, and no right decision can be reached unless the lessons of the past have been well learned and are well understood. Such is my apology for reviewing in a brief way the history of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. It has been done so often that nothing that is new remains to be said. But it is worth doing again just now, because of its applicability to present events, the shaping of which may determine the ultimate fate of our political system quite as completely as did the issues of the contest, more than a century ago, over our still existing and ever glorious federal Constitution. For perils beset the country then from which it was saved by no other means than the adoption of the Constitution; and perils and dangers confront us today from which nothing will save us but a firm adherence to those fundamental principles of right, justice, and liberty which are imbedded in the Constitution. History has a very impressive lesson to teach us, and we shall do well to read and heed it.

The history of our country from the close of the Revolution in 1783 to the adoption of the Constitution in 1788 is a most interesting topic, though not one that inspires in the American student unmixed feelings of pride. Fiske says: "It is not too much to say that the period of five years following the peace of 1783 was the most critical in all the history of the American people. The dangers from which we were saved in 1788 were even greater than the dangers from which we were saved in 1865." And he points out that while men gave up their lives in

our Civil War for the love of union, no such love of union, as a sentiment for which people would fight, existed among the people of these states in 1783. Had there been, the war for liberty would have been shorter by much and its worst hardships would have been avoided.

The colonies that entered upon the Revolutionary War were thirteen in number, each absolutely independent of all the rest. Their population was but three and a half million, which occupied a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast in communities distinct from each other all the way from the Bay of Fundy to the south line of Georgia. Only six of them had definite boundaries, namely, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Massachusetts had title to Maine, Connecticut to that part of Ohio just south of Lake Erie, Virginia to the great Northwest Territory, including what is now Michigan, and North Carolina and Georgia stretched indefinitely to the west. None of them extended in point of population beyond the Allegheny mountains, except as a few pioneers had made their way into Kentucky and Tennessee. Each colony was self-centered, having its own institutions, its own government, and to a large extent its own forms of religion. Each was, so to speak, a separate nationality, and, because of the difficulty of travel, not well informed respecting the others. It is doubtful, for example, whether North Carolina and New Hampshire were not as foreign to each other before the Revolution as are British Columbia and Portugal today..