ation. It is, to adopt that favorite astronomical metaphor which no American panegyrist of the Constitution omits, to keep the centrifugal and centripetal forces in equilibrium, so that neither the planet States shall fly off into space, nor the sun of the Central Government draw them into its consuming fires. The characteristic merit of the American Constitution lies in the method by which it has solved this problem. It has given the National Government a direct authority over all citizens, irrespective of the State Governments, and has therefore been able safely to leave wide powers in the hands of those Governments. And by placing the Constitution above both the National and the State Governments, it has referred the arbitrament of disputes between them to an independent body, charged with the interpretation of the Constitution, a body which is to be deemed not so much a third authority in the Government as the living voice of the Constitution, the unfolder of the mind of the people whose will stands expressed in that supreme instrument.

The application of these two principles, unknown to, or at any rate little used by, any previous federation, has contributed more than any thing else to the stability of the American system, and to the reverence which its citizens feel for it, a reverence which is the best security for its permanence. Yet even these devices would not have succeeded but for the presence of a mass of moral and material influences, stronger than any political devices, which have maintained the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces. On the one hand, there has been the love of local independence and selfgovernment; on the other, the sense of community in blood, in language, in habits and ideas, a common pride in the National history and the National flag.

Quid leges sine moribus? The student of institutions, as well as the lawyer, is apt to overrate the effect of mechanical

contrivances in politics. I admit that in America they have had one excellent result; they have formed a legal habit in the mind of the Nation. But the true value of a political contrivance resides not in its ingenuity, but in its adaptation to the temper and circumstances of the people for whom it is designed, in its power of using, fostering and giving a legal form to those forces of sentiment and interest which it finds in being. So it has been with the American system. Just as the passions which the question of slavery evoked strained the Federal fabric, disclosing unforeseen weaknesses, so the love of the Union, the sense of the material and social benefits involved in its preservation, appeared in unexpected strength, and manned with zealous defenders the ramparts of the sovereign Constitution. It is this need of determining the suitability of the machinery for the workmen and its probable influence upon them, as well as the capacity of the workmen for using and their willingness to use the machinery, which makes it so difficult to predict the operation of a political contrivance, or, when it has succeeded in one country, to advise its imitation in another. The growing strength of the National Government in the United States is largely due to sentimental forces that were weak a century ago, and to a development of internal communications which was then undreamt of. And the devices which we admire in the Constitution might prove unworkable among a people less patriotic and self-reliant, less law-loving and law-abiding, than are the English of America.

THE COOPERATION OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING

PEOPLES1

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER: The noble words to which we have just listened struck, I am well convinced, a sympathetic chord in the heart of every one in your audience, but I don't think that in all the multitude gathered here to-day there was one to whom they went more home than to myself. Mr. President, I have had as the dream of my life a hope that before I died the union between the English-speaking, freedom-loving branches of the human race should be drawn far closer than in the past, and that all temporary causes of difference which may ever have separated two great peoples would be seen in its true and just proportion, and that we should all realize, on whatever side of the Atlantic fortune had place us, that the things wherein we have differed in the past sink into absolute insignificance compared with those vital agreements which at all times, but never at such a time as the present, unite us in one great spiritual whole.

My friend Mr. Choate, in a speech that he delivered yesterday at the City Hall, told his audience that as Ambassador to Great Britain he had been in close official relations with me through many years, and that during all of these years I had stood solid - I think that was his phrase - for American friendship. That is strictly and absolutely true, and the feelings that I have this great opportunity of

1 Speech made before the New York Chamber of Commerce, May 12, 1917, by the head of the British Mission to the United States.

expressing are not born, believe me, of the necessities of the Great War; they are not the offspring of recent events; they are based upon my most enduring convictions, convictions of which I cannot remember the beginning, which I have held with unalterable fidelity through the political life which is now a long life, and which, I am quite sure, I shall cherish to the end.

You, Mr. President, have referred to the preparations that were made only, I suppose, a little more than two years and a half ago - though how long those two and a half years seem to all of us! - preparations that were made two and a half years ago to celebrate the one hundred years of peace between our two countries. I ardently supported that movement, and yet the very phrases in which its objects were expressed show how inadequate it was to reach the real truth and heart of the matter. It is true that one hundred years have passed, and many hundreds of years, I hope, were to pass, before any overt act of war should divide those whom, as you said in your final words, should never be asunder. But, after all, normal and official peace is but a small thing compared with that intimate mutual comprehension which ought always to bind the branches of the English-speaking peoples together. You have absorbed in your midst many admirable citizens drawn from all parts of Europe, whom American institutions and American ways of thought have moulded and are moulding into one great people. I rejoice to think it should be so. A similar process on a smaller scale is going on in the self-governing dominions of the British Empire. It is a good process; it is a noble process. Let us never forget that wherever be the place in which that great and beneficent process is going on, whether it be in Canada, whether it be in Australia, or whether on the largest scale of all it be in the United States of America, the spirit which the immigrant absorbs is a spirit in all these places largely due to

a historic past in which your forefathers and my forefathers, gentlemen, all had their share.

You incidentally mentioned, Mr. President, that this very body I am addressing dates the origin of its society to a charter, I think you said of 1758. Is not that characteristic and symbolic of what happens on both sides of the Atlantic? We strike our roots into a distant past. We have known how through revolutions, in spite of revolutions, sometimes because of revolutions, and through revolutions, we have known how to weld the past and the present into one organic whole, and I see around me in a country which calls itself and is, in one sense, a new country - I everywhere see signs of these roots which draw their nourishment and their strength from epochs far removed from us, and I feel when I talk to those who are born and bred under the American flag, who have absorbed all their political ideas from American institutions

I feel, and I think I speak for my friends here that they also feel I feel that I am speaking to those brought up, as it were, under one influence, in one house, under one set of educational conditions. I require no explanations of what they think, and I am required to give no explanations of what I think, because our views of great questions seem to be shared; born, as it were, of common knowledge which we know instinctively, and which we do not require explicitly to expound or to define.

This is a great heritage to have in common, and I think, nay, I am sure, that you, Mr. President, struck a true note when you told us that all the sentiments which I have imperfectly tried to express this afternoon will receive a double significance, and infinitely increased significance from the fact that we are now not merely sharing a common political ideal in some speculative fashion, but that all of us are committed to sacrificing everything that we hold most dear to carry these ideals into practical execution.