States in a year and a half are as great as those of a century and a quarter preceding 1917. If a magician's wand could still the guns, cage the airships, and petrify the submarines to-day, those changes would still go on, making of the United States of America a new country. By no possibility can we ever go back to be the United States of a year ago. Our country is changed in internal conditions and external relations, changed in the organization of its man power, in the form of its government, in its ideals of public service, in its conception of playing a great part in the world.

That the ideals of America have been altered is a thing far surpassing in significance the little cataclysms from day to day. Acts of Congress, speeches of the President, decisions of draft boards, edicts of the Fuel Lord, plans of field campaign, methods of warfare-all these are only outward evidences of an inward feeling. Now, inward feelings are the real substance of life. Calvin and his fellow theologians were absolutely right in insisting that what a man believes is much more important than what he does, in the sight of God and man. The whole war is a striking example of the tremendous effect of national beliefs, ambitions, and guiding principles in forcing men and nations into action which by all ordinary calculation is contrary to their own interests. The great question in American life and American government is not what the authorities and the people are doing, but what American people think is right in national conduct, for their conceptions of right and wrong will direct their national policy. Nothing can be clearer than that the most cherished principles of government are ignored; that the American mind has coined a new set of ideas and ideals, based on the fundamental necessity of keeping democracy alive, notwithstanding many sacrifices of the traditional essentials of democracy.

The first and most obvious alteration in the United States arising from the war is in the Federal government. The States and cities have been little disturbed either in their

form or activities. For instance, in Massachusetts a Constitutional Convention has sat for months in 1917 and 1918 and seems nearly satisfied with the State Constitution of 1780. It discountenances any serious alterations to fit the Commonwealth to war conditions or to the critical period after the war. The only recognized alterations in state government are the upheaval of the militia and a slight tendency to enlarge the authority and prestige of the Governors. Likewise, city governments have hardly felt the hot breath of war. In New York a man with a high reputation throughout the nation for stubborn loyalty was defeated for mayor by a candidate who up to that time had little reputation for anything. Whatever the advantages or defects of state or city governments, they have not as governments seized the opportunity to make the people feel their significance; they have allowed private societies, clubs, fraternities, and other organizations to appeal to the affection and imagination of the people.

This apathy is the more surprising because the Federal government has undergone a tremendous readjustment, although the machinery shows little sign of alteration. We have still, as we had a year ago, a national government conscientiously separated into three co-ordinate departments: (1) Legislative, the two Houses of Congress; (2) Executive, composed of a President with an appointed Cabinet, semiindependent administrative commissions, and a highly specialized system of bureaus, with a classified civil service; and (3) Judiciary, culminating in a Supreme Court with power to pass upon, and if necessary to disallow, Acts of Congress. All this machinery is still grinding away in apparent smoothness.

But as a matter of fact, every one of these three departments of government has undergone enormous changes, which are approved by the people; many of which will continue after the war is over. The President has loomed up as the head of the Executive, the government, and the na

tion; his vast powers over foreign relations and as commander-in-chief of the armies and navies give him an ability to make decisions which place him among the most powerful potentates on earth. The Cabinet has always been subject to the President, in the sense that he selects the members, and either by positive pressure or by negative refusal of support may compel them to withdraw. On the face of it, this relation to the Cabinet has not been changed; but the man who can at this time issue orders to the Secretary of War, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State, is to a large degree the government of the United States, both in the eyes of foreign nations and in the minds of his fellow countrymen.

This immense power has been strengthened by the wholesome provisions of the Overman Bill, empowering the President to reclassify and reorganize the executive bureaus. Before that measure, a bureau was a kind of Frankenstein created by Act of Congress, and nourished by specific appropriations. To upset a bureau was an act of impiety, though the departments were subdivided in a haphazard fashion. The new law authorizes the President to break up any executive bureaus and to fit them together again so as to do their jobs effectively. It gives him the power inherent in the heads of banks or railroads or trusts. For instance, in the Interior Department was formed a flourishing Chemical Bureau which dealt with noxious gases in mines and had developed into a laboratory of war gases. In the War Department there was a Gas Defense Service. All gas chemists, civilian employees and military men, are now concentrated into one intensive body, which is a part of the War Department.

The President has also become the premier of Congress through a long process followed out by President Roosevelt, President Taft, and President Wilson. These three vigorous executives made it a habit to appeal over the heads of Congress to the people at large. When Congress has resisted, the President's veto power has been used-or threatened,

which is about as effective. In all his war measures the President has demanded and received from Congress everything upon which he has set his heart. He has been the actual legislative authority. When he wanted a single Food Administrator, he stood out against an angry Senate until the point was yielded to him. In open addresses through the two Houses of Congress, in public letters to members of Congress, he states the decisions to which he has come; and so far they have all been ratified by the nominal legislative branch.

As for the third independent department, the Judiciary, it is made up precisely as it was before the war; nothing has been changed in its constitutional or statutory powers; yet as the balance wheel in the government, as the automatic detector of aggressions by the other two co-ordinate powers, as the last resort against usurpation, it is a nullity so far as military matters are concerned. And everything is now military which the military holds to be military. The Supreme Court has sustained the Executive in conscription, and shows no disposition to qualify the espionage and other Acts which hew close to the constitutional line. Judging by the experience of the Civil War, the United States courts will not interfere with any laws, military or financial, or with the conduct of the President, or with the acts of military subordinates which he does not disavow.

Another extra-constitutional element of our war government is the creation of a new executive service, based very little on positive statutes. For thirty years we have put important features of the Federal administration into the hands of commissions, partly executive, partly legislative, and partly judicial, not easily held responsible to the President, and exercising vast powers over banks, railroads, corporations, trusts, shipping, and labor. When the war came on, that matter speedily adjusted itself; for, with the exception of the Federal Reserve Bank, these powerful commissions were practically put out of business. Their field of operation was

partly absorbed, partly centralized, and partly prohibited by the war administration.

Before the war broke out, a Council of National Defense was formed by Act of Congress which, as soon as war began, developed into a giant organization of administrations, and expert administrative counsellors, such as the world never saw before. It includes boards on aircraft production, munition standards, general munitions, commercial economy, inter-departmental advice, shipping, women's work, coal production, and co-operation with States. A general advisory commission was added with sub-committees on transportation, engineering and education, munitions, supplies, raw material, labor, press, publicity, cost of living, and medicine and surgery--all this with adjunct state committees and a multitude of sub-committees. Except the main board, this whole machinery is composed of persons not otherwise connected with the government; that is, the principle is to bring to the aid of the government the experts throughout the nation. The people have requisitioned engineers, educators, successful business men, manufacturers and miners, labor leaders, and women of great organizing capacity. To be sure, this complex of boards is contrary to all our traditions and practices.

It is against the universally received doctrines of American popular government to seek the counsels, still less to accept the authority, of men who have no official place in the government, who perhaps draw no salaries, who take no part in the executive routine and reach their places through no political influence. On the other hand, the nation has had a splendid lesson in the conservation of the highest-geared man power in the land. It has called upon the business experience of laborious lifetimes, the secret of the laboratory, the skill of the engineer, the science of the trained financier and economist, and made them available for a great public need. If this mighty intellectual force helps to save the country in a crisis, why may it not be used to perpetuate the efficiency