I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it.  I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program.  You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow.  You must knit the new into the old.  You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture and intention.  If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.

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One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from all over the world.  I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary by their presence.  I had been casting around in my mind for something by which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century.  His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his thought the thing I had been waiting for.  He called my attention to the fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age.  For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development and accommodation to environment.

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory.  You have only to read the papers of The Federalist to see that fact written on every page.  They speak of the “checks and balances” of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,—­how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.

They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution.  Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories.  It was a Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had copied Newton’s description of the mechanism of the heavens.