kept up with the change of political circumstances; and therefore we are
not even where we were when we started. We shall have to run, not until we
are out of breath, but until we have caught up with our own conditions,
before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this
great experiment which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And
we should have to run twice as fast as any rational program I have seen in
order to get anywhere else.

I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason,
because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the
economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as
other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts
of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will
always have the better of the argument; because if you do not adjust your
laws to the facts, so much the worse for the laws, not for the facts,
because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which
runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it and makes it follow the
will-o'-the-wisps of imaginative projects.

Business is in a situation in America which it was never in before; it is
in a situation to which we have not adjusted our laws. Our laws are still
meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily
adjusted to business done by great combinations, and we have got to adjust
them. I do not say we may or may not; I say we must; there is no choice.
If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are not injured, the law is
damaged; because the law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the
expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered
the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted
interests as they have arisen and have changed toward one another.