reason to suppose that suitable laws to meet the new conditions cannot be
enacted without either overriding or amending the constitution. The liberty
of contract and the right of private property which are protected by the
limitations of the constitution are held subject to the police power of
government to pass and enforce laws for the protection of the public
health, public morals, and public safety. The scope and character of the
regulations required to accomplish these objects vary as the conditions
of life in the country vary. Many interferences with contract and with
property which would have been unjustifiable a century ago are demanded by
the conditions which exist now and are permissible without violating any
constitutional limitation. What will promote these objects the legislative
power decides with large discretion, and the courts have no authority to
review the exercise of that discretion. It is only when laws are passed
under color of the police power and having no real or substantial relation
to the purposes for which the power exists, that the courts can refuse to
give them effect. By a multitude of judicial decisions in recent years our
courts have sustained the exercise of this vast and progressive power
in dealing with the new conditions of life under a great variety of
circumstances. The principal difficulty in sustaining the exercise of the
power has been caused ordinarily by the fact that carelessly or ignorantly
drawn statutes either have failed to exhibit the true relation between the
regulation proposed and the object sought, or have gone farther than the
attainment of the legitimate object justified. A very good illustration
of this is to be found in the Federal Employer's Liability Act which
was carelessly drawn and passed by Congress in 1906 and was declared
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but which was carefully drawn and
passed by Congress in 1908 and was declared constitutional by the same
court.
Insistence upon hasty and violent methods rather than orderly and
deliberate methods is really a result of impatience with the slow methods
of true progress in popular government. We should probably make little
progress were there not in every generation some men who, realizing evils,
are eager for reform, impatient of delay, indignant at opposition, and
intolerant of the long, slow processes by which the great body of the
people may consider new proposals in all their relations, weigh their
advantages and disadvantages, discuss their merits, and become educated
either to their acceptance or rejection. Yet that is the method of progress
in which no step, once taken, needs to be retraced; and it is the only way
in which a democracy can avoid destroying its institutions by the impulsive
substitution of novel and attractive but impracticable expedients.
The wisest of all the fathers of the Republic has spoken, not for his
own day alone but for all generations to come after him, in the solemn
admonitions of the Farewell Address. It was to us that Washington spoke
when he said:
"The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make
and to alter their constitutions of government; but the Constitution
which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic
act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.... Towards
the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present
happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance
irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you
resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however
specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the
forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of
the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In
all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and
habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments
as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard
by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a
country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis
and opinion, exposes to perpetual changes, from the endless variety of
hypothesis and opinion."
While, in the nature of things, each generation must assume the task of
adapting the working of its government to new conditions of life as they
arise, it would be the folly of ignorant conceit for any generation to
assume that it can lightly and easily improve upon the work of the founders
in those matters which are, by their nature, of universal application to
the permanent relations of men in civil society.
Religion, the philosophy of morals, the teaching of history, the experience
of every human life, point to the same conclusion--that in the practical
conduct of life the most difficult and the most necessary virtue is
self-restraint. It is the first lesson of childhood; it is the quality for
which great monarchs are most highly praised; the man who has it not is
feared and shunned; it is needed most where power is greatest; it is needed
more by men acting in a mass than by individuals, because men in the mass
are more irresponsible and difficult of control than individuals. The
makers of our constitution, wise and earnest students of history and
of life, discerned the great truth that self-restraint is the supreme
necessity and the supreme virtue of a democracy. The people of the United
States have exercised that virtue by the establishment of rules of right
action in what we call the limitations of the constitution, and until
this day they have rigidly observed those rules. The general judgment of
students of government is that the success and permanency of the American
system of government are due to the establishment and observance of
such general rules of conduct. Let us change and adapt our laws as the
shifting-conditions of the times require, but let us never abandon or
weaken this fundamental and essential characteristic of our ordered
liberty.