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.
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.
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