The English government and institutions were held up as a model to be imitated fifty times; as an example to be avoided, twenty-four times. France was held up as a model three times, and as a warning five times. Rome was cited five times as a model and seven times as a warning.
From the standpoint of training, experience, and general qualifications for constitution makers, the delegates who sat in the Federal convention at Philadelphia were the most remarkable group of statesmen the world has ever seen. Sixty-five delegates were chosen, of whom fifty-five attended the convention and of these thirty-nine signed the Constitution, three were present but refused to sign, and thirteen were absent on the last day. Of the fifty-five who sat in the convention, twenty-five were from northern States and thirty from southern States. Of the thirty-nine signers, nineteen were from the North and twenty from the South.
Of the fifty-five men thirty were college men, twenty-six had degrees, forty-seven were afterwards prominent in public life; of the remaining eight, at least four died soon after the close of the convention. The most noted men were: Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Wilson, Patterson, Gerry, Sherman, Pinckney, and Randolph. Six men who signed the Constitution had also signed the Declaration of Independence—Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, Robert Morris, and George Clymer of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and George Read of Delaware.—Meyerholz's The Federal Convention.
George Washington expressed the vast importance of this thought when he said: “The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make or alter their constitution of government.”
“The Constitution is itself in every rational sense and to every useful purpose a bill of rights.”—Alexander Hamilton.
“Much of the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people depends on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors. I hope, therefore, for our own sakes, as a part of the people and for the sake of our posterity, that we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts and endeavors to the means of having it well administered.”—Benjamin Franklin.
“In the fullness of time a Republic rose up in the wilderness of America. Thousands of years had passed away before this child of the ages could be born. From whatever there was of good in the systems of former centuries, she drew her nourishment; the wrecks of the past were her warnings. The wisdom which had passed from India through Greece, with what Greece had added of her own, the jurisprudence of Rome, the mediaeval municipalities, the Teutonic method of representation, the political experience of England, the benignant wisdom of the expositors of the law of nature and of nations in France and Holland, all shed on her their selectest influence. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics—she sought the vital elements of social forms and blended them harmoniously in the free commonwealth which comes nearest to the illustration of the natural equality of all men. She entrusted the guardianship of established rights to law; the movement of reform to the spirit of the people and drew her force from the happy reconciliation of both.”—George Bancroft.
“In spite of its supposed precision, and its subjection to judicial construction, our constitution has always been indirectly made to serve the turn of that sort of legislation which its friends call progressive, and its enemies call revolutionary, quite as effectively as though Congress had the omnipotence of parliament. The theory of the latent powers to carry out those granted has been found elastic enough to satisfy almost any party demands in time of peace, to say nothing of its enormous extensions in time of war.”—The Nation, November 7, 1872, No. 384, p. 300.
“Our fathers by an almost divine prescience, struck the golden mean.”—Pomeroy's An Introduction to the Constitutional History of the United States, p. 102.
“It (the United States Constitution) ranks above every other written Constitution for the intrinsic excellence of its scheme, its adaptation to the circumstances of the people, the simplicity, brevity and precision of its language, its judicious mixture of definition in principle with elasticity in details. One is induced to ask, to what causes, over and above the capacity of its authors and the patient toil they bestowed upon it, these merits are due, or in other words, what were the materials at the command of the Philadelphia Convention for the achievement of so great an enterprise as the creation of a nation by means of an instrument of government. The American Constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring it is likely to prove. There is little in this Constitution that is absolutely new. There is much that is as old as Magna Charta.”—James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth.