Principles Unchanged

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 20, 1911

Principles Unchanged

The following significant utterances, made in a recent address to the United States Senate by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, are worthy of note:—

“Of the men who framed the Constitution of the United States, it is the fashion now to speak as worthy, able, patriotic persons, whom we are proud to have embalmed in our history, but toward whom no enlightened man would now think of turning seriously for either guidance or instruction, so thoroughly has everything been altered. It is commonly said that they dealt wisely and well with the problems of their day, but that, of course, they knew nothing of the problems which confront us, and that it would be worse than folly to be in any degree governed by the opinions of men who lived under such wholly different conditions.”

“It seems to me that this view is partial, and not wholly correct nor complete. There are, of course, many problems with which we are compelled to deal of which the framers of the Constitution had, and in the nature of the things could have had, no knowledge,—the questions of railroads, the problem of great combinations of capital,—but they dealt with certain other problems which are as old as the race, and they mastered certain conditions which exist to-day just as much as they existed then. On questions of this character, I think, their opinions are not to be lightly put aside; for, after all, however much we may gently patronize them as good old patriots long since laid in their honored graves, they were none the less men who would have been eminent in any period of history, and might even, if alive now, attain distinction.”