“And yet money monopoly is a monopoly of not merely one, but of all commodities.”
Arthur Kitson.
The Open Door of the Constitution
THE NECESSITY FOR AMENDMENTS AND OUR FAILURE TO REVISE THAT DOCUMENT BY THE METHOD SUGGESTED BY ITS FOUNDERS
BY FREDERICK UPHAM ADAMS
Author of “The Kidnapped Millionaires,” “John Burt,” “Colonel Monroe’s Doctrine” and “The Shades of the Fathers”
THE men who builded the Constitution were consumed by no senseless adulation of their own handicraft. They were not possessed of the delusion that they were inspired, neither did they dream that future generations would search the record of their quarrels and selfish compromises for the key which would enable them to solve problems as they arose. They planned a document for the regulation of a people whom they believed unfitted for more than a small share in the affairs of government. They were not blind to its imperfections, but they assumed that those who came after them would have the sense to remedy defects as they developed under the operation of the system then timidly launched.
There is this justification for the worship of the founders of the Constitution, viz., they had the common sense to revise and modify their governmental charter so as to conform to new conditions—a trait or an instinct of which hardly a trace remains in their descendants.
In the popular parlance of those days the proposed Constitution was called “The New Roof,” and its founders urged the people to get under it and keep out of the rain. It is difficult to address an appeal to a people which prefers to venerate that roof on account of its antiquity, rather than to repair the innumerable leaks and fissures due to decay and to the gales and storms of more than a hundred years.