Let us begin with a frank acknowledgment: the American fondness for new structural forms is both virtue and fault politically. Since our proneness to frequent alteration of governmental structures engenders a certain self-distrust, we place upon our actions the restraint found in our tortuous constitutional amending process. Still hankering for change, however, and finding the amending process too rigid, we bend and twist the meaning of the fundamental law with amazing casuistry. The defect as well as the virtue of this practis obvious. On the one hand we change a structure before it has been thoroughly tested, having mistakenly hoped, in the first place, to achieve complete reform by structure and law alone. On the other hand, no one can deny that this willingness to change and experiment with new forms and institutions has contributed to governmental and political progress. City manager government, popular initiation of legislation, direct nomination of party candidates, the organization, control and operation of regional areas like the T.V.A. and the Port of New York Authority, and many recent creations in governmental structure and operations— all these, despite certain difficulties and weaknesses, have contributed to the general advancement of the theory and practice of government. Disappointment, of course, has often followed reform. Too much has been promised, and performance has fallen short of expectations. Bitter disillusionment has often brought reaction. And yet, no one can seriously maintain that in the long run we have not progressed. It is true that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pressure for regulation and control of utilities did not result in a wholesale reform of big business and its practices. Yet, while big business might have been forced to adopt methods less brutal and less careless of the public interest, it was at least kept from returning to its older “public-be-damned” attitude. If some few reforms have been totally ineffective, most of them have been a decided improvement on the older, less efficient, less popularly responsive systems which they replaced.