Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/159

140 new social power makes the new ideas, and that the command of new power of sustaining life on earth gives birth to new philosophies.

Acts, ordinances, and resolutions fall dead unless there is a social field fit for them; history is full of the skeletons of such still-born enactments. The same may be said of institutions. Institutions have had immeasurable importance in human history, but nowadays institution has become a word to juggle with. There have been all sorts of institutions, and those of them which have been invented by human wit have only served to bring human wit into scorn. Institutions which have been strong and effective have grown, we scarcely know how, because the soil and the seed were present. If that is so, then behind institutions we must seek the causes and conditions which brought them into being and nourished their growth. That brings us to social forces again.

In civil affairs it is most commonly believed that we can make constitutions as we choose, and that the wisdom of constitution-makers shapes the destinies of peoples. Is this so? Have we a republic because the men of 1787 voted so? Are our institutions democratic because those men disliked aristocracy and loved democracy? I do not so read history, although the current expressions in our literature all imply that such is the case. It was the industrial and social power of the masses of the population in a new country with unlimited land which made us democratic. It is the reflex influence of the new countries on the old centers of civilization which is breaking down aristocracy, and making them democratic too; but it is because the opening of the new continents has made a demand for men — it has brought about a call for more population. The consequence is