Never since man first walked erect have his relations toward nature been
so changed, within the same space of time, as they have been since
Washington was elected President and the Parisian mob stormed the
Bastille. Washington found the task of a readjustment heavy enough, but
the civilization he knew was simple. When Washington lived, the fund of
energy at man's disposal had not very sensibly augmented since the fall
of Rome. In the eighteenth, as in the fourth century, engineers had at
command only animal power, and a little wind and water power, to which
had been added, at the end of the Middle Ages, a low explosive. There
was nothing in the daily life of his age which made the legal and
administrative principles which had sufficed for Justinian insufficient
for him. Twentieth-century society rests on a basis not different so
much in degree, as in kind, from all that has gone before. Through
applied science infinite forces have been domesticated, and the action
of these infinite forces upon finite minds has been to create a tension,
together with a social acceleration and concentration, not only
unparalleled, but, apparently, without limit. Meanwhile our laws and
institutions have remained, in substance, constant. I doubt if we have
developed a single important administrative principle which would be
novel to Napoleon, were he to live again, and I am quite sure that we
have no legal principle younger than Justinian.

As a result, society has been squeezed, as it were, from its rigid
eighteenth-century legal shell, and has passed into a fourth dimension
of space, where it performs its most important functions beyond the
cognizance of the law, which remains in a space of but three dimensions.
Washington encountered a somewhat analogous problem when dealing with
the thirteen petty independent states, which had escaped from England;
but his problem was relatively rudimentary. Taking the theory of
sovereignty as it stood, he had only to apply it to communities. It was