citizen before the safety of the commonwealth. Yet by unwritten means,
out of simple self-protection, that constitution has been given strength and
flexibility to meet the threats and disasters of a hundred and sixty years.
The result is one of the most interesting forms of government the world has
seen, and in the light of its problems one of the most successful.

The special problems of the American Government derive from geog-
raphy, national character, and the nature both of a written constitution
and of a federal empire. The government is cramped and confined by a
seemingly rigid bond; yet it must adapt itself to a rate of change in eco-
nomics, technology, and foreign relations which would have made all pre-
vious ages dizzy. In good times the government must abide by the theory
that its limited sovereignty has been divided between the Union and the
several states; yet when the bombs fall or the banks close or the breadlines
grow by millions it must recapture the distributed sovereignty and act like
a strong centralized nation. The government must regard the separation
of its own powers, especially those of the Executive and the Legislature,
as an essential and indeed a sacred part of the system; yet when the sepa-
ration threatens deadlock and danger it must reassemble those powers in-
formally and weld them into a working team. Finally, the government
must accept the fact that in a country so huge, containing such diverse
climates and economic interests and social habits and racial and religious
backgrounds, most politics will be parochial, most politicians will have
small horizons, seeking the good of the state or the district rather than of
the Union; yet by diplomacy and compromise, never by force, the govern-
ment must water down the selfish demands of regions, races, classes, busi-
ness associations, into a national policy which will alienate no major group
and which will contain at least a small plum for everybody. This is the
price of unity in a continent-wide federation. Decisions will therefore be
slow, methods will be cumbersome, political parties will be illogical and
inconsistent; but the people remain free, reasonably united, and as lightly
burdened by the state as is consistent with safety.

It may be asked, if the inevitable problems are so acute and so contra-
dictory why not change the form of government? The answer is that the
American political system with all its absurdities is one of the few successes
in a calamitous age. Step by step, it has learned to avoid many of the worst
mistakes of empire, in a nation which would stretch from London to the
Ural Mountains and from Sweden to the Sahara; it has learned to cir-
cumvent threats of secession (the mortal illness of federalism) before they
appear; it has learned to evade class warfare (the mortal illness of lib-
erty), and to the dismay of its critics it shows no sign of moving toward

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