Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/137

 be subject to modification whenever the people desire the changes. The mode of amendment having been designed to make changes difficult, or impossible (though in recent years several changes have been adopted), leading progressives have long held that that fundamental article ought to be amended first in order to facilitate other changes. This was Justice John B. Winslow's opinion, put forth in 1912; it was the burden of an important plank in the La Follette national platform the same year; that doctrine was preached, at least in spirit, by the late President Roosevelt. In short, it is a progressive principle that the constitution must cease to be a fetish—a dead hand upon the present and the future—and must be adjusted, from time to time, to existing social, economic, and political conditions. The document represents, for the time, a mighty triumph of constructive statesmanship, so progressive leaders believe, and it should not be changed "for light or transient causes," much less revolutionized, but "it was designed for a rural or semi-rural state." The men who made it "however able could not anticipate or solve the new problems of life and government which have come upon us in the last half century."

To follow Senator Cashman's outline of American history into the recent period to the all-engrossing event of the World War and America's participation therein would be fruitless. Not one of us can conscientiously claim to be an impartial investigator with respect to things which have wrenched our souls. We cannot abdicate our own personalities. In treating the war, all that any historian at present could hope to do would be to state his views with becoming restraint and concede that those views may ultimately prove to be quite wrong. A censorship law of fifty years hence (if our people shall then still adhere to the censorship idea) would be sure to condemn the