LLOYD GEORGE. I fail to understand you.

CLEMENCEAU. My suggestion would be that you recognize an Irish Republic-but reserve the moving picture rights. Their commercial value would go far to relieve the anxiety of your Chancellor of the Exchequer.

LLOYD GEORGE. I fear that Mr. Wilson has preempted that field.

CLEMENCEAU. Well, we have had a lesson in Constitutional government, and we can now understand much that was unintelligible to us before America's entry into the war. However, we dare not offend our friend; for he represents her power and resources.

I have lived in America, and I know the passionate devotion of its people to their Constitution. For a time -and especially during the period of a war-they will remain silent while the Great Charter which their fathers gave them is treated as a "scrap of paper." But they are not fooled forever.

Slowly but surely that mighty Hercules, the American people, will hold our would-be Antæus aloft in the air, only to throw him to the Mother Earth of reality. After that rude shock, he will be the "mighty somnambulist of a shattered dream."

CHAPTER II

THE OLD FREEDOM

"Liberty, to be enjoyed, must be limited by law; for law ends where tyranny begins, and the tyranny is the same be it the tyranny of a monarch or of a multitude,-nay, the tyranny of the multitude may be the greater, since it is multiplied tyranny." EDMUND BURKE.

Having now considered the New Freedom, as expounded by its foremost apostle, Mr. Wilson, let us briefly consider and contrast the Old Freedom, which was and fortunately still is.

The Old Freedom under which the United States has grown immeasurably great was best defined by the founders of the American Commonwealth in the Constitution of the United States. Those who framed that wonderful document clearly recognized that in this democratic age all governments are obliged to steer between the Scylla of mobocracy and the Charybdis of one-man despotism. They sought to avoid this by ordaining the noblest covenant of government that the wit of man has yet devised. Nothing was further from their thought than to give unrestrained power either to one man or to the people. The Constitution is a standing protest against either despotism.

It will be noted that in the Constitutional Convention the very great men who participated in its debates never referred to democracy, except in condemnation

of its excesses. The exact definition which they gave to the word democracy must be borne in mind.

Democracy, as they defined it, was the direct action of the people. Republicanism, as they defined it and of which the Constitution is the noblest expression, was government by representatives chosen by the people. Thus James Madison, in the tenth of the Federalist papers, declared that pure democracies "have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." Alexander Hamilton asserted that "the members most tenacious of republicanism were as loud as any in declaiming against the evils of democracy," and added: "Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few; give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many. Both, therefore, ought to have the power, that each may defend itself against the other." To establish a government which would, in Hamilton's phrase, "unite public strength with individual security," the Constitution of the United States was ordained.

When the Fathers met in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they determined to create a representative democracy, and not a direct one. With full agreement on this basic idea, their final success was not reached without acute and almost fatal differences upon other questions. For nearly four months they labored in secret, with multiplied and accentuated differences: but the suspense ended and the crisis passed, Franklin, pointing to the half-disk of the sun, painted on the chair of the president of the convention, made

the prophetic remark that, while he had often, in the weary and arduous months of the Convention, wondered whether that sun was a symbol of a rising or a setting sun for that America, to which he had freely given more than half a century of his noble life, concluded:

"But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

To-day, when the Sun, whose rising Franklin so clearly saw, is seemingly in its noontide splendor, with its rays illumining the whole world, we can see the full realization of the sage's prophecy. Its partial eclipse, which we owe to the "New Freedom," will be like all eclipses, only temporary. Indeed the sun of our constitutional freedom emerged in 1787 from an eclipse of popular government. The present organic unity of the United States blinds us to the terrible conditions out of which the Constitution grew, and this notwithstanding the fact that there is a remarkable similarity between world conditions in 1787 and those of the present hour. Then, as now, a world war had just ended. Then, as now, there had been a swift and terrible reaction in the souls of men from the nobility of purpose and the divine spirit of selfsacrifice that had animated the nations in their fierce struggle for existence. As Washington said, "The whole world was in an uproar," and again he said the difficulty was "to steer between Scylla and Charybdis." Especially deplorable were the conditions in the colonies in the years that had intervened between the

treaty of peace and the meeting of the Constitutional Convention.

The days that followed Yorktown were as truly the times "that tried men's souls," as the period of bitter struggle, when the fortunes of Washington's little army found their lowest ebb at Valley Forge. In fact, the times were graver; for a nation can always resist external aggression better than internal dissension.

The spirit of anarchy, or, as we would now say, Bolshevism, had swept a people already gravely tried in the fiery furnace of war.

Credit was gone, business paralyzed, and lawlessness rampant. Not only between class and class, but between State and State, there were acute controversies and an alarming disunity of spirit. The currency of the little nation was valueless. It had shrunk to the nominal ratio of one cent on the dollar. Even its bonds were sold at one-fourth their value. The slang expression, "Not worth a Continental," is a surviving evidence of the contempt for the financial credit of the country. Tradesmen derisively plastered the walls of their shops with worthless bills. The armies were unpaid and only their love for their great leader kept them from open revolt. It seemed to many-and to Washington himself-that the heroic struggle for independence would end in a general fiasco, which would confound the lovers of liberty in every land and again enthrone autocracy or anarchy. To weld thirteen jealous and discordant States, inhabited by men of different races, creeds and classes, into a unified and efficient nation, was a seemingly impossible task. Its final