824 
Law -Making. 
{Am.  Jour.  Pharm 
November,  1920 
government  is  that  a  nation  which  wilHngly  submits  to  the  suspen- 
sion of  the  principles  of  free  government  for  the  sake  of  expediency, 
or  for  the  accompHshment  of  some  quick  and  immediate  reform  will 
in  the  end  always  come  to  grief.  Principles  that  can  be  suspended 
for  beneficient  purposes  can  also  be  suspended  for  evil  purposes, 
and  laws  intended  for  purely  good  ends  can  also  be  enforced  op- 
pressively. 
THE  FUNDAMENTAL  PRINCIPLES  OF  FREE  GOVERNMENT  ARE 
PERMANENT. 
Another  lesson  from  the  history  of  political  experiments  is  that 
the  fundamental  principles  of  free  government  do  not  vary  with 
the  changing  values  of  the  factors  of  civilization.  A  principle  of 
government  essential  to  the  preservation  of  liberty  in  one  age  is 
essential  to  the  preservation  of  liberty  in  every  age. 
By  certain  doctrinaire  reformers  of  the  present  day  the  United 
States  constitution  is  considered  to  be  obsolete  and  out  of  date  be- 
cause it  was  composed  before  the  age  of  telephones,  wireless  teleg- 
raphy and  flying  machines.  It  would  be  as  reasonable  to  consider 
the  principles  of  arithmetic  as  obsolete  because  they  were  discov- 
ered before  the  invention  of  modern  business  methods. 
Civil  government  is  not  a  problem  of  mechanics  but  of  human 
nature,  and  no  group  of  men  who  ever  lived  had  a  keener  or  closer 
information  of  the  essential  qualities  of  human  nature  than  the 
statesmen  who  formulated  the  federal  constitution  and  the  bill  of 
rights  that  was  made  a  part  of  that  document.  They  were  not  only 
men  of  rare  natural  ability  but  they  met  their  task,  with  a  face  to 
face  directness  and  with  a  freshness  of  experience  with  govern- 
mental tyranny  that  their  successors  have  not  had. 
These  men  said:  No  government  has  ever  had  unlimited  power 
over  the  lives  and  destinies  of  its  people  that  it  did  not  eventually 
exercise  its  powers  oppressively.  We  will  prevent  such  a  disaster 
by  making  it  a  fundamental  principle  of  the  federal  constitution 
that  the  powers  of  the  government  shall  be  limited  strictly  to  matters 
of  general  concern,  and  will  prohibit  its  interference  in  the  lives  and 
liberties  of  the  individual  citizen,  except  in  so  far  as  they  are  inti- 
mately and  directly  connected  with  the  powers  expressly  given. 
Similar  considerations  induced  the  placing  of  corresponding  limita- 
tions upon  the  powers  of  the  governments  created  by  the  earlier 
state  constitutions. 
