THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY 63 



the American people are not so far behind those of Great Britain as 

 many suppose. Not until 1912 was a federal bureau established to 

 gather information about children. We were one of the last among the 

 leading nations of the world to take steps to abolish the wholly un- 

 necessary disease known as " phossy jaw." The visionary and imprac- 

 ticable enthusiast is probably accorded as scant a hearing in the United 

 States as in any other country. Our toleration of all sorts of fads and 

 isms should not be mistaken for approval. In many industries, such 

 as steel, agricultural implements, the textile trades and dressed meats, 

 the individual has become a cog in a huge industrial machine. Never- 

 theless, a return to the scheme of production formerly in vogue is not 

 seriously considered. Probably the Socialists are as much opposed to 

 sacrificing the efficiency of large-scale production as any one else. We 

 pride ourselves on our freedom from tradition, all the time oblivious to 

 the fact that we have been rapidly gathering a set of traditions all our 

 own. We have clung tenaciously to competition as a regulator of the 

 railway industry long after it has broken down, and we are seeking to 

 restore competitive conditions by dissolving the trusts. We have a 

 strong aversion to a third term for the presidency. We still retain the 

 form of the electoral college, and the custom of Congress not meeting in 

 regular session till thirteen months after its members have been 

 chosen. A population that is instinctively radical would hardly have 

 tolerated our judicial system for more than one hundred years. Our 

 system of checks and balances is of the very essence of conservatism. 

 We content ourselves with a written constitution so rigid that, like a 

 religious creed, the only well-recognized mode of amendment is by 

 interpretation and the slow process of accretion. Interstate commerce 

 has increased by leaps and bounds, and many of our industries have 

 become nation-wide in character, and yet we retain a distribution of 

 powers between the states and the nation intended for a time when 

 comparatively little commerce crossed state lines, when industry was 

 largely a neighborhood affair, and when the sense of nationality was 

 weak. Our constitution antedates "the railroad, the steamboat, and 

 the French Eevolution, and was contemporary with George the Third, 

 Marie Antoinette, and flintlock muskets." 24 

 An appreciative foreign observer remarks: 



So far as their Constitution is concerned the American people have shown 

 themselves the most stable of all people. Their Constitution is to-day the same 

 as -when it was created; in the century and a quarter that has elapsed since then, 

 the constitution of England — England, the very type of conservatism — has 

 silently changed; Englishmen have seen disestablishment, the enlargement of the 

 franchise, real parliamentary representation and government, the removal of 

 political disabilities, the last relics of feudal privileges destroyed. To speak of 



24 Walter E. Weyl, op. cit., p. 15. 



