The Theory of Social Revolutions | Page 3

Confederation, and I know no better description of the interval just
subsequent to the peace of 1783, than is contained in a few lines in his
dissenting opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case:--
"In order to entertain a just view of this subject, we must go back to
that period of general bankruptcy, and distress and difficulty (1785)....
The union of the States was crumbling into ruins, under the old
Confederation. Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce were at their
lowest ebb. There was infinite danger to all the States from local
interests and jealousies, and from the apparent impossibility of a much
longer adherence to that shadow of a government, the Continental
Congress. And even four years afterwards, when every evil had been
greatly aggravated, and civil war was added to other calamities, the
Constitution of the United States was all but shipwrecked in passing
through the state conventions."[1]

This crisis, according to my computation, was the normal one of the
third generation. Between 1688 and 1765 the British Empire had
physically outgrown its legal envelope, and the consequence was a
revolution. The thirteen American colonies, which formed the western
section of the imperial mass, split from the core and drifted into chaos,
beyond the constraint of existing law. Washington was, in his way, a
large capitalist, but he was much more. He was not only a wealthy
planter, but he was an engineer, a traveller, to an extent a manufacturer,
a politician, and a soldier, and he saw that, as a conservative, he must
be "Progressive" and raise the law to a power high enough to constrain
all these thirteen refractory units. For Washington understood that
peace does not consist in talking platitudes at 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.
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