without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Of the pressing need of this restraint, no better proof is to be had than the mass of litigation involving it that has come before the courts since its adoption.
But liberty and justice, the sole warrant of any community to the title of a free democracy, are not born of a constitution, however ingeniously provided with checks and balances or devoutly worshiped in leader and speech. Hardly had the new Government been launched before there was another of the countless demonstrations that the wisest resolution is no certain bar to the greatest folly—that boast as the political quack may of the efficacy of his machinery, it has neither potency nor virtue beyond the people that work it. Despite the sacredness of the Constitution, so piously worshiped by the party in power, it was remorselessly wrenched to add Louisiana to the Federal domain. With like disregard of its inviolable principles of freedom, the alien and sedition laws were passed in a time of peace; and without the excuse of war, the embargo was established. Under the Nemesis of political intrigue, the electoral provisions of the new Magna Charta were permitted to lapse without a twinge of remorse. Long before the republic, so solemnly ordained "to establish justice" and to "promote the general welfare," had passed the first half century of its existence, its citizens had discovered how it could be converted into a powerful instrument of private greed. The tariffs of 1816, 1824, and 1828 were progressive applications of the ethics of the robber barons. The American spoils system, an institution sacred to the memory of the most democratic of democrats, was only a metamorphosis in the interest of the politician of the monarchical system of official favorites.
Despite these violations of liberty and justice, the theory and practice of government for the first seventy years of the republic were in the main a realization of Jefferson's ideal. If it had not always been "wise," it had been "frugal." If it had sometimes taken "from the mouth of labor the bread it had earned," it had restrained "men from injuring one another," and left "them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement."[1] Under this regime of freedom, the American people wrought the greatest industrial miracle of history. They won a continent from savagery, and turned forests and prairies into farms and gardens; they built hundreds of towns and cities, and established industries of mining and manufacturing of fabulous wealth; they engaged in moral and social reforms that promised a new earth, if not a new heaven. In a word, they exhib-
- ↑ American Orations, vol i, p. 160.
