It (the American Constitution) is the greatest work ever struck off at any one time by the mind and purpose of man.
An eminent lawyer has said:
It has been the priceless adjunct of free government, the mighty shield of the rights and liberties of the citizen. It has been many times invoked to save him from illegal punishment, and save his property from the greed of unscrupulous enemies, and to save his political fights from the unbridled license of victorious political opponents controlling [pg 205] legislative bodies; nor does it sleep, except as a sword dedicated to a righteous cause sleeps in its scabbard.
Horace Binney says:
What were the States before the Union? The hope of their enemies, the fear of their friends, and arrested only by the Constitution from becoming the shame of the world.
Sir Henry Maine gives the following estimate of the Constitution:
It isn't at all easy to bring home to the men of the present day, how low the credit of the Republic had sunk before the establishment of the United States.... Its success has been so great and striking, that men have almost forgotten, that if the whole, or the known experiments of mankind in governments be looked at together, there has been no form of government so successful as the republican.
Justice Mitchell of Pennsylvania, some twenty odd years ago said:
A century and a decade has passed since the Constitution of the United States was adopted. Dynasties have arisen and fallen, boundaries have extended and shrunken 'till continents seem almost the playthings of imagination and war; nationalities have been asserted and subdued; governments built up only to be overthrown, and the kingdoms of the earth from the Pillars of Hercules to the Yellow Sea have been shaken to their foundations. Through all this change and obstruction, the Republic, shortest lived of all forms of government in the prior history of the world, surviving the perils of foreign and domestic war, has endured and flourished.
And yet, it is true, “and pity 'tis, 'tis true”, that in these days there seems to be a great lack of confidence, nay even a feeling of contempt existing in the minds and hearts of many men for this great charter of human liberty. Men born to the blessings of freedom, men who do not stop to think about the cost of freedom, men who do not realize that this Nation is not the child of chance, but that it is the outgrowth of centuries of tears and blood and sacrifice in the cause of human freedom—these men assume an attitude of criticism, and would, by destroying the Constitution, fly from the “ills we have” and open their arms to evils “we know not of”.