should accept it unconditionally, and thus secure what in it was good, and that the four last should accept on the previous condition, that certain amendments should be agreed to; but a better course was devised, of accepting the whole, and trusting that the good sense and honest intentions of our citizens, would make the alterations which should be deemed necessary.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, Works. I. 79.

CRITICAL COMMENT

WEBSTER (1833)

The Constitution of the United States, founded in or on the consent of the people, may be said to rest on compact or consent; but it is not itself the compact, but its result. When the people agree to erect a government, and actually erect it, the thing is done, and the agreement is at an end. The compact is executed, and the end designed by it attained. Henceforth, the fruit of the agreement exists, but the agreement itself is merged in its own accomplishment; since there can be no longer a subsisting agreement or compact to form a constitution or government, after that constitution or government has been actually formed and established. . . .

The Constitution, Sir, regards itself as perpetual and immortal. It seeks to establish a union among the people of the States, which shall last through all time. . . . It is the association of the people, under a constitution of government, uniting their power, joining together their highest interests, cementing their present enjoyments, and blending, in one indivisible mass, all their hopes for the future. Whatsoever is steadfast in just political principles; whatsoever is permanent in the structure of human society; whatsoever there is which can derive an enduring character from being founded on deep-laid principles of constitutional liberty, and on the broad foundations of the public will, all these unite to entitle this instrument to be regarded as a permanent constitution of government.

DANIEL WEBSTER, Works. III. 468, 478.

STORY (1833)

In our future commentaries upon the constitution we shall treat it, then, as it is denominated in the instrument itself, as a constitution of government, ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves and their posterity. They have declared it the supreme law of the land. They have made it a limited government. They have defined its authority. They have restrained it to the exercise of certain powers, and reserved all others to the states or to the people. It is a popular government. Those, who administer it, are responsible to the people. It is as popular, and just as much emanating from the people, as the state governments. It is created for one purpose; the state governments for another. It may be altered, and amended, and abolished at the will of the people. In short, it was made by the people, made for the people, and is responsible to the people. . . .

The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes, for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted, which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the constitution; that which will give it efficacy and force, as a government, rather than that, which will impair its operations, and reduce it to a state of imbecility. Of course we do not mean, that the words for this purpose are to be strained beyond their common and natural sense; but keeping within that limit, the exposition is to have a fair and just latitude, so as on the one hand to avoid obvious mischief, and on the other hand to promote the public good. . . .

But a constitution of government, founded by the people for themselves and their posterity, and for objects of the most momentous nature, for perpetual union, for the establishment of justice, for the general welfare, and for a perpetuation of the blessings of liberty, necessarily requires, that every interpretation of its powers should have a constant reference to these objects. No interpretation of the words, in which those pow

ers are granted, can be a sound one, which narrows down their ordinary import, so as to defeat those objects.

JOSEPH STORY, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. 134, 139, 141.

GLADSTONE (1878)

The students of the future, in this department [political philosophy], will have much to say in the way of comparison between American and British institutions. The relationship between these two is unique in history. It is always interesting to trace and to compare Constitutions, as it is to compare languages; especially in such instances as those of the Greek States and the Italian Republics, or the diversified forms of the feudal system in the different countries of Europe. But there is no parallel in all the records of the world to the case of that prolific British mother, who has sent forth her innumerable children over all the earth to be the founders of halfa-dozen empires. She, with her progeny, may almost claim to constitute a kind of Universal Church in politics. But, among these children, there is one whose place in the world's eyes and in history is superlative: it is the American Republic. She is the oldest born. She has, taking the capacity of her land into view as well as its mere measurement, a natural base for the greatest continuous empire ever established by

man.

And for the political student all over the world, it will be beyond anything curious as well as useful to examine, with what diversities, as well as what resemblances, of apparatus, the two greater branches of a race born to command have been minded, or induced, or constrained to work out, in their sea-severed seats, their political destinies according to the respective laws appointed for them. . . .

There were, however, the strongest reasons why America could not grow into a reflection or repetition of England. Passing from a narrow island to a continent almost without bounds, the colonists at once, and vitally, altered their conditions of thought, as well as of existence, in relation to the most important and most operative of all social facts, the possession of the soil.

...

It is to the honour of the British monarchy that, upon the whole, it frankly recognized the facts, and did not pedantically endeavour to constrain by artificial and alien limitations the growth of the infant States. It is a thing to be remembered that the accusations of the colonies in 1776 were entirely levelled at the King actually on the throne, and that a general acquittal was thus given by them to every preceding reign. Their infancy had been upon the whole what their manhood was to be, self-governed and republican. Their Revolution, as we call it, was like ours in the main, a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a Conservative revolution; and the happy result was that, notwithstanding the sharpness of the collision with the mother-country, and with domestic loyalism, the Thirteen Colonies made provision for their future in conformity, as to all that determined life and manners, with the recollections of their past. The two constitutions of the two countries express indeed rather the differences than the resemblances of the nations. The one is a thing grown, the other a thing made; the one a praxis, the other a poiesis; the one the offspring of tendency and indeterminate time, the other of choice and of an epoch. But, as the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man. It has had a century of trial, under the pressure of exigencies caused by an expansion unexampled in point of rapidity and range: and its exemption from formal change, though not entire, has certainly proved the sagacity of the constructors, and the stubborn strength of the fabric.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, Kin Beyond Sea in Gleanings of Past Years. I. 204-212.

COOLEY (1880)

In America the leading principle of constitutional liberty has from the first been, that the sovereignty reposed in the people; and as the people could not in their collective capacity exercise the powers of government, a written constitution was by general consent agreed upon in each of the States. These constitutions

...

create departments for the exercise of sovereign powers; prescribe the extent of the exercise, and the methods, and in some particulars forbid that certain powers which would be within the compass of sovereignty shall be exercised at all. . . . The constitution, moreover, is in the nature of a covenant of the sovereign people with each individual thereof, under which, while they intrust the powers of government to political agencies, they also divest themselves of the sovereign power of making changes in the fundamental laws except by the method in the constitution agreed upon. The Constitution of the United States creates similar governmental trusts and imposes similar restrictions. . . .

The government created by the Constitution is one of limited and enumerated powers, and the Constitution is the measure and the test of the powers conferred. Whatever is not conferred is withheld, and belongs to the several States or to the people thereof. As a constitutional principle this must result from a consideration of the circumstances under which the Constitution was formed. The States were in existence before, and possessed and exercised nearly all the powers of sovereignty. The Union was in existence, but the Congress which represented it possessed a few powers only conceded to it by the States, and these circumscribed and hampered in a manner to render them of little value. . . . But it was not within the intent of those who formed the Constitution to revolutionize the States, to overturn the presumptions that supported their authority, or to create a new government with uncertain and undefined powers. The purpose, on the contrary, was to perpetuate the States in their integrity, and to strengthen the union in order that they might be perpetuated. . . . By Art. VI. it is declared that "This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Upon this it is to be observed:

(1) The Congress of the United States derives its power to legislate from the Constitution, which is the measure of its authority; and any enactment of Congress which is opposed to