Mr. Baker's Book

PROGRESS AND THE CONSTITUTION--Newton D. Baker--Scribner's ($1.25). Newton Diehl Baker has written a book in which he analyzes progress under the Constitution. The book includes three lectures before the University of Virginia Law School--Progress in Institutions, Progress in Industry, Progress in Foreign Relations. The life of civilized man in our day differs more from George Washington's than Washington's from that of Julius Caesar; Jefferson, in a desk drawer at Monticello, is said to have had the constitutions of 100 democracies--all failures: these statements preface Mr. Baker's explanation of the endurance of ours by reason of its lack of definiteness and detail and its early administration under leadership the character and traditions of which reached backward through centuries of struggle for constitutional liberty in England. Attention is strikingly directed to the modification of the original legislative, executive and judicial departments by the creation of great administrative departments combining legislative and judicial functions, which are likely to increase in number, there being no other way of adapting the instrument to modern complexities.

Full and crystal-clear consideration traces the progressive relationship of a constitution "made in the days of the village blacksmith" to the titanic industry of our own age. But obviously the section on foreign relations most deeply engages the author's mind and heart. A source of serious concern to him is the ability of the House of Representatives by its revenue powers, of the Senate by its treaty powers, of the Supreme Court in judicial review, and of the several states by independent local action, to delay or nullify careful negotiations with the rest of the human race. The author's solicitude, here dispassionate, doubtless reflects the chagrin of President Wilson's friend and closest Cabinet associate at the fate of the Versailles Treaty. He pleads for constitutional adequacy to aid in preventing another world-wide conflagration.

The Author. Newton D. Baker, 54, West Virginian by birth, educated at Johns Hopkins, was City Solicitor and Mayor of Cleveland through a stirring municipal upheaval and Secretary of War during the Great War. He is short of stature,slim, dark, shell-spectacled. His resemblance to Charles Lamb, Voltaire and Mephistopheles is amusing; but his eyes, if not finer, are more kindly than Satan's. He works all day and reads all night in law and literature. His garden abuts upon a golf course; but on Saturday (summer) afternoons he weeds, unperturbed by the passing of derisive foursomes. He is an author of the truest quality, and his voice--a voice of liquid gold--is lent to every civic cause. He is a trades unionist in principle and practice but believes in the open shop. He is a fighting pacifist. He is the only man of whom the Encyclopedia Britannica reversed its opinion completely within a decade. General Pershing said of him: "He has made possible what I have done." He is a loyal friend, a gracious enemy. In his presence conversation is rarely trivial and never low. He is not all things to all men; he is the same thing to all men, a gentleman and a scholar. If a Greek piano-tuner visited his house professionally, Mr. Baker would learn all about the insides of a piano and the piano-tuner would hear about Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.