The Constitution of the United States / A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution

by James M. Beck

This stability is the more remarkable when we recall the profound and revolutionary change that has taken place in the social life of man since the Constitution was adopted. It was framed at the very end of the pastoral-agricultural age of humanity. The industrial revolution, which has more profoundly affected man in the last century and a half than all the changes which had theretofore taken place in the life of man since the cave-dweller, was only then beginning. Measured in terms of mechanical power, men when the Constitution was formed were Lilliputians as compared with the Brobdingnagians of our day, when man outflies the eagle, outswims the fish, and by his conquest and utilization of the invisible forces of nature has become the superman; and yet the Constitution of 1787 is, in most of its essential principles, still the Constitution of 1922. This surely marks it as a marvel in statecraft and can only be explained by the fact that the Constitution was developed by a people who, as "children brave and free of the great mother-tongue," had a real genius for self-government and its essential element, the spirit of self-restraint.

While it is true that the text of the instrument has suffered almost as little change as the Nicene Creed, yet it would be manifest error to suggest that in its development by practical application the Constitution has not undergone great changes.

The first and greatest of all its expounders, Chief Justice Marshall, said, in one of his greatest opinions, that the Constitution was—

"intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs. To have prescribed the means by which government should in all future times execute its powers would have been to change entirely the character of the instrument and to give it the properties of a legal code. It would have been an unwise attempt to provide by immutable rules for exigencies which, if foreseen at all, must have been foreseen dimly, and can best be provided for as they occur."

In this great purpose of enumerating rather than defining the powers of government its framers were supremely wise. While it was marvellously sagacious in what it provided, it was wise to the point of inspiration in what it left unprovided.

Nothing is more admirable than the self-restraint of men who, venturing upon an untried experiment, and after debating for four months upon the principles of government, were content to embody their conclusions in not more than four thousand words. To this we owe the elasticity of the instrument. Its vitality is due to the fact that, by usage, judicial interpretation, and, when necessary, formal amendment, it can be thus adapted to the ever-accelerating changes of the most progressive age in history, and that a people have administered the Constitution who, in the process of such adaptation, have generally shown the same spirit of conservative self-restraint as did the men who framed it.

The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it, on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the erosion of the waves. It is rather to be likened to a floating dock, which, while firmly attached to its moorings, and not therefore the caprice of the waves, yet rises and falls with the tide of time and circumstance.

While in its practical adaptation to this complex age the men who framed it, if they could "revisit the glimpses of the moon," would as little recognize their own handiwork as their own nation, yet they would still be able to find in successful operation the essential principles which they embodied in the document more than a century ago.

Its success is also due to the fact that its framers were little influenced by the spirit of doctrinarianism. They were not empiricists, but very practical men. This is the more remarkable because they worked in a period of an emotional fermentation of human thought. The long-repressed intellect of man had broken into a violent eruption like that of a seemingly extinct volcano.

From the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the French Revolution the masses everywhere were influenced by the emotional, and at times hysterical, abstractions of the French encyclopedists; and that these had influenced thought in the American colonies is readily shown in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its unqualified assertion of the equality of men and the absolute right of self-determination. The Declaration sought in its noble idealism to make the "world safe for democracy," but the Constitution attempted the greater task of making democracy safe for the world by inducing a people to impose upon themselves salutary restraints upon majority rule.