James Beck

That vision will remain with them as long, and no longer, as there is in their hearts a conscious and willing acquiescence in its wisdom and justice.

That vision still remains as an ideal with the American people and still leads them to ever-higher achievements, for in all the mad changes of a frenzied hour, they have not yet lost faith in or love for the Constitution of the Fathers!

Without that vision to restrain each succeeding generation of Americans from the tempting excesses of political power, the American Commonwealth, with its great heterogeneous democracy, would probably perish.

Under the American Constitution, they are part of the fundamental law, and, as such, enforceable by judges sworn to defend the integrity of the individual as fully as the integrity of the State.

It did not believe that the State was omnipotent or infallible, and yet it proclaimed its authority within wise and just limits.

The greatest and noblest purpose of the Constitution was not alone to hold in nicest equipose the relative powers of the nation and the States, but also to maintain in the scales of justice a true equilibrium between the rights of…

Of this spirit one of the noblest expressions is the Constitution of the United States.

Its protection should be given to those of superior skill and diligence, who ask the due rewards of such superiority.

The tendency of group morality to standardize man--and thus reduce all men to the dead level of an average mediocrity--is one that the law should combat.

We must defend the right to work against those who would either destroy or degrade it.

It must champion the human soul in its God-given right to exercise freely the faculties of mind and body.

But the law can do something to protect the soul of man from destruction by the soulless machine.

It is easy to exaggerate the value of all political institutions; for they are generally on the surface of human life and do not reach down to the deep under-currents of human nature.

But what can man-made law do in this warfare against the blind forces of Nature?

Assuredly, the man of to-day, with the rich heritage of countless ages, can do no less.

All the horrible resources of mechanics and chemistry were utilized to coerce the human soul, and all proved ineffectual.

I have faith in the inextinguishable spark of the Divine, which is in the human soul and which our complex mechanical civilization has not extinguished.

While the temper of the times seems for the moment pessimistic, it merely marks the recognition of man of an abyss whose existence he barely suspected but over which his indomitable courage will yet carry him.

If we of this generation can only recognize that the evil exists, then the situation is not past remedy; for man has never yet found himself in a blind alley of negation.

To rekindle in men the love of work for work's sake and the spirit of discipline, which the lost sense of human solidarity once inspired, would do much to solve the problem, for work is the greatest moral force in the world.

I fear that this is the case with most men who, like Dante, have crossed their fiftieth year and find themselves in a "dark and sombre wood.

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace!

Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society.