sometimes a young man who begins life with brilliant talents, undertakes this profession, and presently, finding it difficult, turns to another, and after a while leaves that and turns to another, and then to still another. His life is wasted. There is a little tendency of that kind in government. No great principle can be applied year after year, and generation after generation, where the people develop incompetency, and cease to grow in intelligent capacity. No principle can be applied without meeting obstacles, and being surrounded by inconveniences, and having the faint-hearted say, "Let us find some other way to work out our salvation. Oh, to abandon the hard and painful and trying effort!"

To grow in power, to grow in capacity for true liberty and true justice by holding fast to true principles, is hard. There are many who grow tired, who would find some easier way; but the easier way will but lead from the true path into some other easy way, and that into some other. Self-government, which is the basis and essence of our free republican government, is hard and discouraging. It requires courage and persistency and true patriotism to keep the grip on the handle of the plow and drive the furrow through. But wherever there is a true principle embodied in our constitution, we must stand by it and maintain it against all patent nostrums.

On the other hand, there are indications extensive and numerous of a reaction from certain extreme views, from certain enthusiasm for new devices in government. But we must remember that if reaction goes too far the pendulum will swing back the other way. All our statements of principle must be re-examined, not with faint hearts, but with a sincere purpose to ascertain whether the statement is sound and right, and whether it needs modification with reference to the new conditions in order more perfectly to express the principle.

I feel very differently about this convention from the way in which I felt twenty years ago, because it seems to me that upon this field of action dealing with the fundamental principles of our government we are performing the highest and most sacred duty that civilization ever demands from man. All the little questions of form and method may be right or wrong; we may solve them rightly or wrongly. If they are wrong they will be changed. If the law is wrong it will be changed. If it is not perfect it will be amended. But when a people undertakes to state fundamental principles of its government, it is putting to the test its right and its power to live. Millions of men in western Europe today who are battling with each other, dying by the thousands, are fighting upon one side or the other of two different conceptions of national morality. Homes are desolated, children left fatherless, because two great principles of national morality have met in their death-grip. The nation which lays hold of the truth, of the true principles of liberty and justice will live. The nation that is wrong, the nation that fails to grasp the truth, will die. In our effort or attempt to make and remake the constitutions of our beloved country we are putting to the test the very life of the country. To that task we should address ourselves with the prayer that we may be free from selfishness. That task should be performed with a sense of duty to one's country that rises to the level of religion. With the help of all the good men and women of our state we should be able to keep this convention right, upon the eternal principles by which alone our free and peaceful and just country can continue.

THE BUSINESS MEN AND THE CONSTITU

TIONAL CONVENTION

ADDRESS BEFORE THE MERCHANTS' ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK MARCH 25, 1915

In the address preceding, Mr. Root spoke in advance of the constitutional convention upon the principles and practice of constitutional revision. In the present address, also delivered before the opening of the convention, he spoke of the business men of the state and the constitutional convention. As Mr. Root refers on two occasions in this address to Mr. Choate, it is proper to quote a few paragraphs of Mr. Choate's remarks in introducing Mr. Root, in order that the reader may understand the relations existing between these two men. Mr. Choate said:

It is fifty years about since I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Root, a stripling as he appeared to me then, just come down from Hamilton College and admitted to the bar. I was some twelve or fourteen years ahead of him. I had not the least idea that he would ever catch up at all. But he did catch up in a very few years, and it was not long before Bangs and Parsons and Carter and I, who were doing a good deal of the heavy work at that time, found him going neck and neck with us, and it did not take very long for us to find that he was forging ahead of us all, . . .

...

I will tell you the secret of Mr. Root's success. In the first place, of course, it is "the sound mind in the sound body," a great brain, a well-knit frame, and exceedingly good habits; but then, besides that, he was an infinite worker; I think he worked flying; wherever he moved, he was working, and that accounted for his success at the bar.

But I will tell you what I regard as the great feature of his personal and professional career, and that is that from the first he was ready to forego the profits of his practice to render public service,

NEVER listen to Mr. Choate without recalling the sense

see him carry juries away and steal verdicts from my unfortunate clients. But it is impossible not to forgive him. He contributes so much to my happiness and the happiness of all of his countrymen that I can forgive him even for the fatal injury he does me in setting up a standard that I cannot possibly live up to.

I thank you, gentlemen, for this greeting and for the great compliment of your gathering here at a luncheon which is avowedly for the purpose of making me the guest of the Association. There is but one disadvantage in the vastness of this assemblage, and that is that it is necessary in talking with you to talk very loud, and it is quite impossible for any one, in loud tones of voice, to be quite as sensible as he can sometimes be in ordinary conversation. There is always a temptation to attempt oratory, and as a rule oratory and sense are to be found in inverse proportions.

There is a substantial satisfaction to me, not all personal, in this great gathering; it is a satisfaction due to perceiving that the business men of New York are at last taking an interest in their own public affairs; that you are at last taking an interest in the over-head charges of all your business, which are created by the conduct of government; that you are at last taking an interest, before it is too late, in the law and the administration which create opportunity or hamper enterprise. Do not think that I am dropping into oratory when I say that. There are great parts of the people of the United States who feel that the man who makes any money by successful business is a robber, and it is time that that feeling was dispelled and that that view should become a vagary of the past.

Now, Americans must always keep their faces toward the future, and the thing that is admittedly before us in a public way in this state is the revision of the state constitution. There are a few things I want to say to you about that.

In the first place, I bespeak your interest for the work of the constitutional convention. It needs speaking for. The votes in this state upon questions of constitutional amendment have ordinarily been most pitiful in number; only from a quarter to a half of the people voting at our elections