party fit to aid him in establishing a vigorous, consolidated,
administrative system. He must have found the pressure toward
disintegration resistless, and if we consider this most significant
phenomenon, in connection with an abundance of similar phenomena, in
other countries, which indicate social incoherence, we can hardly resist
a growing apprehension touching the future. Nor is that apprehension
allayed if, to reassure ourselves, we turn to history, for there we find
on every side long series of precedents more ominous still.

Were all other evidence lacking, the inference that radical changes are
at hand might be deduced from the past. In the experience of the
English-speaking race, about once in every three generations a social
convulsion has occurred; and probably such catastrophes must continue to
occur in order that laws and institutions may be adapted to physical
growth. Human society is a living organism, working mechanically, like
any other organism. It has members, a circulation, a nervous system, and
a sort of skin or envelope, consisting of its laws and institutions.
This skin, or envelope, however, does not expand automatically, as it
would had Providence intended humanity to be peaceful, but is only
fitted to new conditions by those painful and conscious efforts which we
call revolutions. Usually these revolutions are warlike, but sometimes
they are benign, as was the revolution over which General Washington,
our first great "Progressive," presided, when the rotting Confederation,
under his guidance, was converted into a relatively excellent
administrative system by the adoption of the Constitution.

Taken for all in all, I conceive General Washington to have been the
greatest man of the eighteenth century, but to me his greatness chiefly
consists in that balance of mind which enabled him to recognize when an
old order had passed away, and to perceive how a new order could be best