Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/67

Rh 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 unnecessary disease known as "phossy jaw." The visionary and impracticable 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. Nevertheless, 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 Revolution, and was contemporary with George the Third, Marie Antoinette, and flintlock muskets."

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