rected. Experience shows that the Constitution is not difficult of amendment, for the conscience of a people is not bound by a decision which contravenes its ideas of justice. Whatever system is adopted or devised, it must in the end depend upon the wisdom and capacity of the men who administer it, and therefore perfection should not be expected.

That the transition from the older more individualistic order to the newer more complex industrial order is well under way is indicated in numerous ways. A comparison of the laws enacted more recently in the exercise of the police power and for the regulation of individual and group activities with those enacted in an equal number of years in any prior period, makes the truth of this at once manifest. The order of development is of interest. First came a marked increase in the development on the material side, the production of consumable goods. At first increased social pressure was not noticeable, due no doubt to our constantly expanding frontier, which for a time equalized it. With the closing of the frontier, however, which is said officially to have closed in the last decade of the nineteenth century, greater and greater adjustments have been necessary and by statute and decision there has been a conscious effort to facilitate and direct the process of adjustment; hence the rapidly increasing mass of statutes in the last thirty years, which marks the second phase of the transition.

Last of all has come a willingness on the part of the great masses of our people to adjust their thinking and conduct to the new situation. Here the tendency to carry forward the standards and traditions of the past is most strongly exhibited. Industry is manned by individuals who are yet thinking in terms of the old individualistic order. Whatever they are willing to do or say or have done or said as to the duty of others, they refuse to conform in their own affairs to the demands of the newer order. Our material growth and legal development have in many respects outrun the ability of the people to adapt their thought and action to the changing order. The development of statutory law cannot too far precede the acceptance of the new order by the people. If it does, there is consequent loss and reaction and the ground must be traversed again with greater difficulty than in the first in

stance. Witness the progress of laws to regulate the hours and wages of labor. In order to demonstrate that the process of adjustment is proceeding by the application of fundamental constitutional-principles to the relations growing out of the new order, it is only necessary to refer to the great mass of decisions of recent years holding valid legislative enactments regulating hours of labor, wages, conditions of employment, sanitation, housing; laws prohibiting the adulteration of foods and drugs; zoning laws, trading stamp laws, decisions impressing property engaged in public service with a public use, and many others. Many people feel that in thus adapting our legal system to the demands of the newer order, we have departed from the fundamental principles of the Constitution. That is not true. The law deals with legal relations. We have altered our legal concepts so as to make applicable fundamental principles to relationships which did not exist before. For instance, the law of master and servant under the old order embodied the principles which now govern and will continue to govern the same relationship in the new order, but under the new order there was no tradition which threw upon the economic unit in which the individual was employed responsibility for injury and death. Therefore the law has attached to that relationship responsibility on the part of the master in that respect. This works no change in principle but adapts the general principle which had operated under a simpler social order to the conditions as they exist at the present time, and compels industry to bear the burdens properly and necessarily incident thereto as a part of the cost of operation. This in the main it had done in one way or another through all previous time.

The development has proceeded to some extent in a fragmentary and illogical way, but nevertheless it proceeds in accordance with certain underlying fundamental principles. Referring again to the relationship of master and servant, there has been an attempt to carry over into the new order in the form of written law those duties and obligations which the master and the servant recognized and were accustomed to discharge as a matter of tradition under the old order. For instance, the safe place statutes are designed to insure for every work

man in industry the same protection the head of the family would have felt it necessary to provide for his children and employes under the old order. It is because the change from the home to the factory broke the tradition that regulation of the situation by law became necessary. A new relationship was set up which had no such tradition. The beginnings of a new tradition are apparent. Profit sharing schemes, representation of labor in management, industrial insurance, plant organization of various kinds, are indications of an attempt to solve the problems of adjustment by mutual effort rather than by more rigid coercive statutory measures. The underlying principles along which development should proceed are indicated by Dr. Carver in his Essays in Social Justice1 as follows:

It may as well be admitted that the old liberalism erred in assuming a general harmony of interests and in concluding that government control and regulation should be limited to mere protection from violence. The new liberalism must correct this error by recognizing the conflict of interests and extending the control of government to all cases where individual interests conflict. The new gospel of individualism must therefore proclaim three things: 1. The absolute necessity for the suppression of all harmful methods of pursuing one's self-interest. 2. The absolute freedom of the individual to pursue his self-interest in all serviceable ways. 3. The absolute responsibility of the individual for his own wellbeing, allowing those to prosper who, on their own initiative, find ways of serving the community, and allowing those who cannot to endure the shame of poverty.

If the process of adjustment proceeds along these lines, there is no reason why the purpose of the Constitution to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity should not be achieved in an orderly way under constitutional restraints.

In this transitionary period, we are more and more thrown back upon fundamental principles. The difficulty is that many persons seek to apply these principles to the new order in exactly the way they were applied to the old order. If the change from the one order to the other had come more slowly, the adjustment would have been much easier. In no field is the maxim "Make Haste Slowly" more applicable than in the development of the 1 Page 159.

law. However, we must meet conditions as they are and not as we would like to have them.

We must adapt our thinking and our conduct to social facts as they now exist. We may some day free ourselves from the influence of some of the fallacious political concepts of the eighteenth century. While in a very real sense government rests upon the consent of the governed, the activities of man are limited or governed in innumerable ways to which he is never asked to consent. The compact theory of society should never have had a place in our juristic thinking. It may have served a useful purpose, but many unwarrantable inferences are derived from it which have no application to modern life, if indeed they were ever applicable at any time. We are members of one body and we must, in the face of that fact, take up and discharge our appropriate functions. We are not unattached individuals, wandering in social space, giving our consent here and withholding it there. What we need in the field of jurisprudence is more thinking with reference to the facts as they exist and less exposition of eighteenth century philosophical concepts. We need a clearer apprehension of what is necessary to do justice under the present order and less vindication of the concept of natural rights under the old order.

We must restate our ideals in terms of our present day experience. Above all we must not substitute restraint and oppression for liberty, exploitation of class by class for justice, or, in the name of equality, restore class privilege under the law.

MARVIN B. ROSENBERRY.

THE POLICY OF POLITICAL DETACHMENT

BY PHILIP MARSHALL BROWN

A NATIONAL foreign policy is the result of the logic of circumstances: it is not the result of caprice. It is created and established by a succession of men, not by one man.

These circumstances may be misunderstood and misinterpreted at times. Nations may be led by reasons of expediency and the exigencies of the moment to deviate from a settled policy. The dynamic power of a national policy, however, like the force of a glacier, will continue as before in spite of incidental obstacles and temporary deflections.

The truth of this observation may be seen in the development and operation of the national policies of any of the great Powers: of England in the defence of her Empire; of France in the search for security through the principle of Balance of Power; of Italy in its demands for economic independence; of Japan in its solicitude concerning its interests in Asia; and of the United States in its devotion to the Monroe Doctrine.

Such policies inhere in the very nature of things. They may not be safely scorned or casually abandoned unless the basic circumstances which produced them are substantially altered. The maxim rebus sic stantibus applies with peculiar force to them. These alterations of circumstances, like the great climatic changes which alone can affect a glacier, must be of profound and far reaching effect to warrant the abandonment of a long tested national policy. The burden of proof is not on those who resist changes in national policy: it rests on those who demand them.

The foreign policy of the United States toward Europe was based on the fact that Europe had a set of political interests distinct from those of this hemisphere. This fact was recognized very early by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe. Men came to the New World to get away from certain European