The experience of a century and a quarter has shown that while the anchor may at times drag, yet it measurably holds the ship of state to its ancient moorings.

The American Constitution still remains in its essential principles and still enjoys not only the confidence but the affection of the great and varied people whom it rules.

If it should perish to-morrow, it would yet have enjoyed a life and growth of which any nation or age might be justly proud.

Moreover, it could claim with truth, if it finally perished, that it had been subjected to conditions for which it was never intended and that some of its essential principles had been ignored.

The Constitution is something more than a written formula of government--it is a great spirit.

It is a high and noble assertion, and, indeed, vindication, of the morality of government.

It is not only one of the great achievements of that gens aeterna, but also one of the great monuments of human progress.

It illustrates the possibilities of true democracy in its best estate.

When the moral anarchy out of which it was born is called to mind, it can be truly said that while "sown in weakness, it was raised in power.

And yet the right to secede was urged for many years, but Lincoln completed the work of Washington, Franklin, Madison and Hamilton by establishing that "a government for the people, by the people and of the people should not perish from…

That government is free to the people under it, where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; and all the rest is tyranny, oligarchy and confusion.

Is there in this day and generation a spirit of lawlessness greater or different than that that has always characterized human society?

Such spirit of revolt against authority has always existed, even when the penalty of death was visited upon nearly all offences against life and property.

Conceding that lawlessness is not a novel phenomenon, is not the present time characterized by an exceptional revolt against the authority of law?

Not only in the United States, but even in Europe, such crimes of violence are of increasing frequency, and a recent dispatch from Berne, under date of August 7, 1921, stated that the famous International Expresses of Europe were now run…

The streets of our cities, once reasonably secure from crimes of violence, have now become the field of operations for the foot-pad and highwayman.

The days of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard have returned, with this serious difference--that the Turpins and Sheppards of our day are not dependent upon the horse, but have the powerful automobile to facilitate their crimes and make sure…

As to the subtler and more insidious crimes against the political state, it is enough to say that graft has become a science in city, state and nation.

Losses by such misapplication of public funds--piled Pelion on Ossa--no longer run in the millions but the hundreds of millions.

Our city governments are, in many instances, foul cancers on the body politic; and for us to boast of having solved the problem of local self-government is as fatuous as for a strong man to exult in his health when his body is covered with…

Men who thus violate these laws for sordid gain are not likely to obey other laws, and the respect for law among all classes steadily diminishes as our people become familiar with, and tolerant to, wholesale criminality.

In limine, let us note the significant fact that this spirit of revolt against authority is not confined to the political state, and therefore its causes lie beyond that sphere of human action.

Human life is governed by all manner of man-made laws--laws of art, of social intercourse, of literature, music, business--all evolved by custom and imposed by the collective will of society.

In music, its fundamental canons have been thrown aside and discord has been substituted for harmony as its ideal.

In the plastic arts, the laws of form and the criteria of beauty have been swept aside by the futurists, cubists, vorticists, tactilists, and other aesthetic Bolsheviki.