Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/136

 hearty Amen; realizing, of course, that his statement is necessarily a crowded summary, cast in oratorical mould, and not designed as a complete exposition of his views. But, in thus concurring we do not yield up our sympathy with the aphorism of Edmund Burke, that in their reaction to tyranny the colonists "are descendants of Englishmen."

The same reservations might be made with reference to Senator Cashman's statement on the constitution. And yet a fair interpretation of what he says on that subject compels us to class him with those extreme worshipers of that document who, like the authors of the New York teachers' test oath, would maintain the constitution, unchanged, at any cost. Speaking of the fathers and their work, he says: "Then they wrote and the states adopted the supreme law of the land, the American constitution, the most sublime public document that ever came forth from the mind and soul of man, establishing a system of government based upon the consent of the governed, with religious liberty protected, inherent rights guaranteed, to be written in indestructible letters into the pages of the nation's laws." [Editor's italics.] It is a well known view of the present progressives, as it was of the framers themselves, that, great as was the original constitution, it was still far from being perfect. Also, most progressives now accept in principle the conclusions of Charles A. Beard, the historian whose recent investigations on this point are now well known, that the constitution represents a partial reaction from the democracy of the Revolution, and was designed in part to set limitations upon the popular will. While venerating the constitution, progressives in the main believe that such restrictions as the legislative election of senators, the appointment and life tenure of judges (some would include the mode of electing the president), were intentionally anti-democratic, and that these and other defects which time has revealed ought to