conferences, but in organizing a sovereignty strong enough to coerce its
subjects.

The problem of constructing such a sovereignty was the problem which
Washington solved, temporarily at least, without violence. He prevailed
not only because of an intelligence and elevation of character which
enabled him to comprehend, and to persuade others, that, to attain a
common end, all must make sacrifices, but also because he was supported
by a body of the most remarkable men whom America has ever produced. Men
who, though doubtless in a numerical minority, taking the country as a
whole, by sheer weight of ability and energy, achieved their purpose.

Yet even Washington and his adherents could not alter the limitations
of the human mind. He could postpone, but he could not avert, the impact
of conflicting social forces. In 1789 he compromised, but he did not
determine the question of sovereignty. He eluded an impending conflict
by introducing courts as political arbitrators, and the expedient worked
more or less well until the tension reached a certain point. Then it
broke down, and the question of sovereignty had to be settled in
America, as elsewhere, on the field of battle. It was not decided until
Appomattox. But the function of the courts in American life is a subject
which I shall consider hereafter.

If the invention of gunpowder and printing in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries presaged the Reformation of the sixteenth, and if
the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth was the forerunner of
political revolutions throughout the Western World, we may well, after
the mechanical and economic cataclysm of the nineteenth, cease wondering
that twentieth-century society should be radical.