For the tug and moral strain of nations came at last in prosperous peace, not war;)

In many a smiling mask death shall approach beguiling thee, thou in disease shalt swelter,

The livid cancer spread its hideous claws, clinging upon thy breasts, seeking to strike thee deep within,

Consumption of the worst, moral consumption, shall rouge thy face with hectic,

But thou shalt face thy fortunes, thy diseases, and surmount

them all,

Whatever they are to-day and whatever through time they may be,

They each and all shall lift and pass away and cease from

thee,

While thou, Time's spirals rounding, out of thyself, thyself still extricating, fusing,

Equable, natural, mystical Union thou, (the mortal with immortal blent,)

Shalt soar toward the fulfilment of the future, the spirit of the body and the mind,

The soul, its destinies.

The soul, its destinies, the real real,

(Purport of all these apparitions of the real;) In thee America, the soul, its destinies,

Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous!

By many a throe of heat and cold convuls'd, (by these thyself solidifying,)

Thou mental, moral orb - thou New, indeed new, Spiritual

World!

The Present holds thee not for such vast growth as thine, For such unparallel'd flight as thine, such brood as thine, The FUTURE only holds thee and can hold thee.

A CHARTER OF DEMOCRACY1

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

MR. PRESIDENT, and Members of the Ohio Constitutional Convention:

I am profoundly sensible of the honor you have done me in asking me to address you. You are engaged in the fundamental work of self-government; you are engaged in framing a Constitution under and in accordance with which the people are to get and to do justice and absolutely to rule themselves. No representative body can have a higher task. To carry it through successfully there is need to combine practical common sense of the most hard-headed kind with a spirit of lofty idealism. Without idealism your work will be but a sordid makeshift; and without the hard-headed common sense the idealism will be either wasted or worse than wasted.

I shall not try to speak to you of matters of detail. Each of our Commonwealths has its own local needs, local customs, and habits of thought, different from those of other Commonwealths; and each must therefore apply in its own fashion the great principles of our political life. But these principles themselves are in their essence applicable everywhere, and of some of them I shall speak to you. I cannot touch upon them all; the subject is too vast and the time too limited; if any one of you cares to know my views of these matters which I do not to-day discuss, I will gladly send him

1 An address delivered before the Ohio Constitutional Convention, Columbus, Ohio, February, 1912. Reprinted (entire, save for the passage on the recall of judges) through the generous permission of the author and of the Outlook Publishing Company.

a copy of the speeches I made in 1910, which I think cover most of the ground.

I believe in pure democracy. With Lincoln, I hold that "this country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it." We Progressives believe that the people have the right, the power, and the duty to protect themselves and their own welfare; that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master, of the people. We believe that unless representative government does absolutely represent the people it is not representative government at all. We test the worth of all men and all measures by asking how they contribute to the welfare of the men, women, and children of whom this Nation is composed. We are engaged in one of the great battles of the age-long contest waged against privilege on behalf of the common welfare. We hold it a prime duty of the people to free our Government from the control of money in politics. For this purpose we advocate, not as ends in themselves, but as weapons in the hands of the people, all governmental devices which will make the representatives of the people more easily and certainly responsible to the people's will.

This country, as Lincoln said, belongs to the people. So do the natural resources which make it rich. They supply the basis of our prosperity now and hereafter. In preserving them, which is a National duty, we must not forget that monopoly is based on the control of natural resources and natural advantages, and that it will help the people little to conserve our natural wealth unless the benefits which it can yield are secured to the people. Let us remember, also, that Conservation does not stop with the natural resources, but that the principle of making the best use of all we have requires with equal or greater insistence that we shall stop the

waste of human life in industry and prevent the waste of human welfare which flows from the unfair use of concentrated power and wealth in the hands of men whose eagerness for profit blinds them to the cost of what they do. We have no higher duty than to promote the efficiency of the individual. There is no surer road to the efficiency of the Nation.

I am emphatically a believer in constitutionalism, and because of this fact I no less emphatically protest against any theory that would make of the Constitution a means of thwarting instead of securing the absolute right of the people to rule themselves and to provide for their own social and industrial well-being. All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the Nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered, so as to fit human rights. Lincoln so interpreted and administered the National Constitution. Buchanan attempted the reverse, attempted to fit human rights to, and limit them by, the Constitution. It was Buchanan who treated the courts as a fetish, who protested against and condemned all criticism of the judges for unjust and unrighteous decisions, and upheld the Constitution as an instrument for the protection of privilege and of vested wrong. It was Lincoln who appealed to the people against the judges when the judges went wrong, who advocated and secured what was practically the recall of the Dred Scott decision, and who treated the Constitution as a living force for righteousness. We stand for applying the Constitution to the issues of to-day as Lincoln applied it to the issues of his day; Lincoln, mind you, and not Buchanan, was the real upholder and preserver of the Constitution, for the true progressive, the progressive of the Lincoln stamp, is the only true constitutionalist, the only real conservative. The object of every American Constitution worth calling such must be what it is set forth

to be in the preamble to the National Constitution, "to establish justice," that is, to secure justice as between man and man by means of genuine popular self-government. If the Constitution is successfully invoked to nullify the effort to remedy injustice, it is proof positive either that the Constitution needs immediate amendment or else that it is being wrongfully and improperly construed. I therefore very earnestly ask you clearly to provide in this Constitution means which will enable the people readily to amend it if at any point it works injustice, and also means which will permit the people themselves by popular vote, after due deliberation and discussion, but finally and without appeal, to settle what the proper construction of any constitutional point is. It is often said that ours is a government of checks and balances. But this should only mean that these checks and balances obtain as among the several different kinds of representatives of the people judicial, executive, and legislative — to whom the people have delegated certain portions of their power. It does not mean that the people have parted with their power or cannot resume it. The "division of powers" is merely the division among the representatives of the powers delegated to them; the term must not be held to mean that the people have divided their power with their delegates. The power is the people's, and only the people's. It is right and proper that provision should be made rendering it necessary for the people to take ample time to make up their minds on any point; but there should also be complete provision to have their decision put into immediate and living effect when it has thus been deliberately and definitely reached.

I hold it to be the duty of every public servant, and of every man who in public or in private life holds a position of leadership in thought or action, to endeavor honestly and fearlessly to guide his fellow-countrymen to right decisions;