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"The United States"

Response of the Honorable William H. Taft to the Toast
"The United States" at the Fifteenth Annual Dinner of
The Pennsylvania Society, December 13, 1913.

NEW YORK
The Pennsylvania Society
249 West 13th Street

"THE UNITED STATES."
Mr. President and Gentlemen of The Pennsylvania Society; Ladies
and Gentlemen:
I have been invited to respond to the toast of the "United
States." I regard this as a very delicate and kindly compliment,
reminiscent in its nature, and recalling former greatness. The
United States is no longer in my keeping, and I am not at all sure
that it is not better for the United States, as I am sure that it is
better for me. The situation, therefore, is, as it was when the
inqtiiry was made at the funeral what the complaint was, and
the reply was that there was no complaint because everybody was
satisfied. Still the kindly spirit of these post mortem epitaphs is
very pleasant even to those who lie under the sod. I am not quite
so sure what the effect of necrological comment may be upon the
spirits of those who have gone before, when it is of a severely con
demnatory and muckraking character. Whether it will stir the sub
jects of it to move in their graves or not, I have not had sufficient
cemetery experience, as yet, to know. But the question presents
itself with considerable force, in view of some of the tendencies of
this present iconoclastic age.
We have been in the habit of regarding the United States as
fortunate in its birth. We have supposed that there was no other
government in the world that had such a galaxy of patriotic states
men to preside over its birth as this American Republic of ours.
But it was reserved for what John Muir, who has just been beaten
in his Hetch-Hetchy business, calls "these God-forgetting progressive
days" to prompt in an Associate Professor of Columbia University,
a muckraking investigation into the motives of those whom we
have been wont to revere as the founders of this government, and
to demonstrate that the Constitutional Convention whose work was
said by Gladstone, and by others indeed whose judgment is even
more reliable than his, in that it is more judicial, and calmer,
and more based on an intimate knowledge of history, to be the
greatest single governmental instrument ever struck from the brain
of man. But we are now advised by this sapient investigator, who
evidently began with the conviction and the desire to establish the
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sinister reactionary nature of the Constitution, that the members
of the Convention were owners — ^mark — of Government bonds and
possibly of the financial obligations of some of the colonies. Why
they really must have contributed to the Revolution ! Some of them
actually owned real estate and farms, and even were wicked enough
to hold farm mortgages. And the quod erat demonstrandum is that
the Constitution is a one-sided and unjust instrument because the
bankrupts and the debtors, and by natural inference the ignorant and
the unsuccessful, did not have representatives in the Convention.
Thus the whole plan organized by these plotters against society
and social justice was based on the wicked principle that govern
ments and men should pay their debts. The truth is that we
have arrived at a time in our social development and our free
dom of thought when we know everything and know it hard,
and among other things we know is that people who preceded, us
in this life, and especially in this last one hundred years, did not
know anything. No pent-up-Utica contracts our powers. We
are able to suspend the law of gravitation or any of the economic
laws that have been thought heretofore to work with as much cer
tainty as physical laws, and by their suspension we are going to
make everybody happy without individual effort. We are going
to make the rich moderately poor and the poor moderately rich.
We are going to arrange by legislation that those who do not use
any effort are not to be condemned by loss of just reward for
mere living. We are going to rearrange human nature in such a
way that men will strain their minds and muscles to the point of
perspiration to help other people, and that this is not to be
confined to the few but it is to include everybody. We expect to
exclude the word "demagogue" from the language, to drive politic
ians out of business, and to have only statesmen who with complete
power over legislation will make good the promises of every elo
quent period that is calculated to win votes.
It is true that heretofore the progress that has been made has
been largely dependent on the improvement of the individual and
on the self-restraint and sacrifice that he has been willing to make
to achieve personal advancement and reward. It is true that here
tofore the morality of the individual, defective as that may have

been, has been higher than the morality of the crowd and of the
nation, but we are going to reverse that now, and the nation and
electorate are to manifest a much higher moral tone and moral
course in dealing with society and promoting social justice than
the individual. This is not the result of experience, for its lessons,
at present, are at a discount. This is the result of intuition and in
spiration which come from above. It is true that we seem to have
seen selfish motives still manifesting themselves in some individuals,
but it will be found, by close examination, that they are always reac
tionaries and never Progressives. The line when drawn between
the good and the bad will be found to be the same line that marks
the distinction between the Progressives who are the only good,
and the rest of the world who are the only bad; and one of the
sad features of this momentary situation is that while the generals
of the Progressives' army are still with their flashing swords and
brilliant uniforms holding conspicuous councils and shrinking from
the public gaze, the rank and file of the army seem to be rapidly
becoming a dissolving view, a result doubtless to be attributed to
some evil subterranean eflfbrt of the reactionaries who would retard
human progress.
These men of Baal are still worshipping their godless idols, like
the Constitution of the United States, like Washington and Hamil
ton and Madison, who framed it, and like Marshall and Webster,
who took the instrument from its creators, gave it living form and
expounded its beneficent provisions and upheld its authority, and
like Lincoln and Grant, who defended it against its threatened de
struction by the greatest war of modern times, and like their suc
cessors, who followed it in the rehabilitation of our divided nation
until the very people who attempted its destruction rise now to call
its preservers blessed.
But the Constitution is a poor thing; it derives no sanctity
or value from the character of those who made it, or defended it,
because it has been shown what sordid motives its makers had ; and
the growth of our people under its auspices, and the marvelous
way in which its simple but comprehensive language has met the
requirements of the greatest national expansion in the whole history
of the world are nothing to commend it. The scales have fallen

from our eyes and we know now much more than our fathers.
Our sense of proportion has been greatly stimulated so that we,
the giants of the present day, can look down, as we ought to, on
the pigmies of the past and can smile with a complacent sense of
superiority and with the clearest perception of our own moral
grandeur, upon the base and ignoble views of those who insist that
even the Progressive leaders of this new messianic age can pos
sibly make some mistakes in their judgment, and may in thought
less moments let their left hands know what their right hands do.
It could not be that Lowell, in his Bigelow Papers, had any such
situation in mind, but the ungodly cannot help fitting his words to
the drama that is being enacted on the Progressive stage :
"Parson Wilbur sez he never heerd in his life
That th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller-tail coats.
An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife,
To git some on 'em office, an' some on 'em votes ;
But John P. Robinson he
Sez they didn't know everything down in Judee."
For one hundred and twenty-five years in spite of our wicked
origin, we have flourished like a green bay tree. From something
less than 4,000,000 of people, we have become 90,000,000, and we
are still doing biisiness with our constitution at the same old stand.
True, it has remained for this decade to make itself illustrious by
attacking the instrument from a standpoint that it has taken more
than a century to make respectable ; but I would not at all minimize
the formidable character of the disintegrating forces that are behind
it. We have enjoyed, under the auspices of the Constitution, and
under its restraining influence, a prosperity for the last fifteen years
which has made the average conditions of life throughout the
community more comfortable than ever before in the history of
the world. The effect, of course, has not been to produce satis
faction or contentment with present conditions. That is one of the
characteristics of human nature, one of those traits of man that is
really most valuable, because it generally stirs him to further effort
to make things better, and if in his effort he does not lose his
common sense, he usually in the long run accomplishes further
improvement. But the conceit that such prosperity seems to give
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to a certain part of the whole community, or at least to the more
vociferous and fawning of its leaders, generates a dangerous con
fidence which experience does not justify, that legislation and State
action can make society over and accompHsh every good. And
so we are presented with the temptation which the dog in ^sop's
Fables yielded to, who, with a bone in his mouth, thought he saw
another one in the water, tand dropped the one in trying to get the
other. With our genius for machinery, and a forced analogy from the
strides we have made in labor-saving devices and in reducing the
cost of production, we seem to think that all we need in order to
create a government of the highest efficiency and morality and use
fulness, is to discover some patent device which will do this, without
any special effort at improving the individuals who are its members.
The experiments which failed in Athens and other early democra
cies, and which resulted after a while in the tyranny and then in
the failure of the hasty and unrestricted rule of the majority, are
not to be repeated, but we are to show those ancients what they
did not know and what they did not bring about. We are going to
introduce a system by which we shall tire out the electorate through
having elections every three months, at the will of the cranks and
the Enthusiasts who sign an initiative petition, and we shall then
turn the government over to that active minority who are prompted
by an earnest desire to improve everybody but themselves. Thus
we are to commit the enactment of complicated laws to that
minority at the polls and the decision of nice constitutional ques
tions* to their impartial and discriminating ballots.
The theory that it requires any preparation to construe a con
stitution, to interpret a law, or to apply the principles of customary
law, is of course a rejected one and only an evidence of that
narrow view of things that ought really, if proper criminal laws
were enacted under the new dispensation, to consign its advocates
to limbo. We have prided ourselves on reasonable success in our
efforts to secure equality before the law and equality of opportunity,
but these are the least of our ambitions. We are to live in an
age when everybody knows as much as everybody else, when we
have the happy dead level of equality of experience, equality of edu-
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cation, equality of judgment, and equality of condition and every
thing except, if I may venture an exception, equality of common
sense. The referendum is to be extended. To old fogies it may
seem an hysteria that leads to the strikes of school children, so that
in bodies of one thousand they leave their school houses and
decline to return until the school superintendent or the school board
shall restore some principal whose transfer has been ordered. Of
course, they know as much as either the school superintendent
or the school board as to what is good for the school system, and
what is good for them ; and therefore when their parents commend
their courage and their successs in compelling a re-transfer of the
principal — instead of spanking them and sending them back — we
note the progress that society is making by thus infusing more
democracy to remedy the defects of the present democracy.
We are going to have a scape-goat for those who have previously
been thought to be at fault. A gentleman goes to a penitentiary.
and stays a week, and breaks upon an unoffending and startled
public with headlines in the newspapers announcing that life in a
penitentiary is unpleasant. So we must have a movement which
shall place responsibility for crime not upon the criminals but upon
society. Our views with respect to punishment of the individual
have been topsy turvy heretofore, and now we must set them right.
Wages are paid by great co-operative stores of such amount that it
makes all the proprietors of establishments that employ women
responsible for temptations to prostitution and vice to which some
of them yield. These employers, too, are scape-goats that in this
modern view should be required to pay higher wages and thus make
human nature better and prevent any future yielding to temptations.
The suggestion might seem to be a reflection upon the virtue of
American womanhood, but in these uplifting days, it is the purpose
that justifies any plan, however chimerical it might have seemed a
quarter of a century ago through the eyes of men, dull with ex
perience. I don't think I am a hide-bound reactionary — I am sure I am
not but I can't prove it — and I am far from saying that there have
not been great evils from political corruption and the danger of
plutocracy in this last decade which a popular awakening has done
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tBTOch to minimize. Much of the unsound political doctrine
that seems controlling now is only an excess and an aftermath of'a
great reform. Nor do I deny that beneficial laws may do much
to remove abuse and promote justice and equality of opportunity.
I quite agree that the present agitation is likely to result ultimately
in real progress, but of a less ambitious and more practical character
than the present leaders of the movement would deem worthy their
attention. All these extreme views that savor so much of hysteria
must not diminish our optimism. It may be expensive to pursue
many of the plans proposed, but there is even a greater constitution
than the Constitution of the United States, and that is the con
stitution of man, the constitution of society whose laws are the
economic and natural laws which can never be violated without
a payment of the penalty, and which cannot be amended by a hur
ried referendum.
Our American people, in spite of the efflorescence of some of the
would-be leaders, and in spite of their temporary influence, are
common sense, hard-headed people and they will not need more
than two or three lessons, with accompanying jolts before they
will take note that, after all, less ambitious legislation and the good
old way of honest hard work by the individual, of reward for
self-sacrifice and for providence, and of beginning improvement at
the bottom, instead of at the top, are still the best method of se
curing real progress, that righteousness and morality are personal,
and that on the whole and in the end, every man must bear his own
burden, and that he is not the wisest man who is carried with
every wind of doctrine.
No man can rejoice more than I do in the real awakening among
the people at large and the growth of the spirit of brotherhood
that manifests itself in society today ; and we must regard these wild
theories that common sense and wise experience ought to lead us
to reject summarily, as the temporary result of auto-intoxication.
We must be content to await the real improvement among the
individuals in society that the continued spread of this spirit will
doubtless help to effect. But it will not change human nature in
any such radical way that we don't need a constitution containing
restraints set by the whole people upon the possible abuse of power

by the majority, or that we do not need the checks and balances
which that instrument and others like it secure for the purpose of
making final and ultimate action in its amendment, the result of
calm and clear-headed deliberation. The change of conditions may
doubtless require some modification in our fundamental law from
time to time; but those, as our recent experience shows, may be
easily had when there is a united public opinion in favor of it.
A nation is not for a year or for a decade or for a century.
Substantial changes may well and safely wait a few years or even
decades until the certainty of their value is ascertained and the
clearness of the public will in demanding them is manifested. We
who believe that valuable progress comes by conservative steps love
popular government as much as those who are constantly pro
claiming their love from the housetops; but we don't think it
necessary to use that love in our business by making broad our
philacteries and assuming the attitude of political Pharisees who
are not as other men are. Our love of popular government is so
sincere that we would have it vindicate its existence by its vitality.
by its permanence and by its efficiency, and by the good that it has
wrought and will work for society. We would have it made a
perennial blessing to humanity by introducing into it the divine ele
ment of self-restraint and justice to the less numerous. It is not
those who are constantly fawning upon the people and manifesting
profound admiration for their hasty conclusions and who profess to
see the voice of God expressed by a plurality and minority vote in
one or more elections, that are the real friends of popular govern
ment or that understand the basic principles upon which it is to be
justified in the history of mankind.

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