will. First framed by an assembly in which the States participating in the change were fully represented, and subsequently debated and ratified in conventions of the people in the separate States, the general nature and design of the Constitution may be traced and understood without serious difficulty.

But to the right understanding of its nature and objects, a careful examination of the proceedings of the national Convention is, in the first place, essential. Before we enter, however, upon this examination, there are certain preliminary facts that explain the circumstances in which the Convention was assembled, and which will enable us to appreciate the results at which it arrived. To these, therefore, the reader is now desired to turn.

First of all, then, it is to be remembered that the national Convention of 1787 was assembled with the great object of framing a system of government for the united interests of the thirteen States, by which the forms and spirit of republican liberty could be preserved. The warnings and teachings of the ten preceding years, which I have attempted to describe in a previous volume, had presented to the people of these States the serious question, whether their system of conducting their common affairs then rested upon principles that could secure their permanent prosperity and happiness. That the States had national interests; that each of them stood in relations to the others, and to the rest of the world, which its separate and unaided power was unable to manage with success; and that even its own

internal peace and prosperity required some external protection, - had been brought home to the convictions of the people by an experience that commenced with the day on which they declared themselves independent, and had now forced upon them its last stern and sorrowful lesson in the general despondency of the national heart. As they turned anxiously and fearfully to the near and dear interests involved in their separate and internal concerns, they saw that self-government was a necessity of their existence. They saw that equality before the law for the whole people; the right and the power to appoint their own rulers; the right and the power to mould and form and modify every law and institution at their own sovereign will, to lay restraints upon their own power, or not to lay them, -to limit themselves by public compact to a particular mode of action, or to remain free to choose other modes, were the essential conditions of American society. In a word, they beheld that republican and constitutional liberty, which, with all that it comprehends and all that it bestows, was not only altogether lovely in their eyes, but without which there could be no peace, no social order, no tranquillity, and no safety for them and their posterity.

This liberty they knew must be preserved. They loved it with passionate devotion. They had been trained for it by the whole course of their political and social history. They had fought for it through a long and exhausting war. Their habits of thought

and action, their cherished principles, their hopes, their life as a people, were all bound up in it; and they knew that, if they suffered it to be lost, there would remain for them nothing but a heritage of shame, and ages of confusion, strife, and

sorrow.

Great as was their devotion to this republican liberty, and ardent as was their love of it, they did not value it too highly. The doctrine that all power resides originally in the people; that they are the source of all law; that their will is to be pronounced by a majority of their numbers, and can know no interruption, was not first discovered in America. But to this principle of a democracy the people of the American States had added two real and important discoveries of their own. They had ascertained that their own power might be limited by compacts which would regulate and define the modes in which it shall be exercised. Their written constitutions had taken the place of the royal charters which formerly embraced the fundamental conditions of their political existence, but with this essential difference, that whereas the charter emanated from a foreign sovereign to those who claimed no original authority for themselves, the constitution proceeded from the people, who claimed all authority to be resident in themselves alone. While the charter embraced a compact between the foreign sovereign and his subjects who lived under it, the constitution, framed by the people for their own guidance in exercising their sovereign power, became a com

pact between themselves and every one of their number. In this substitution of one supreme authority for another, some limitation of the mode in which the sovereign power was to act became the necessary consequence of the change; for as soon as the people had declared and established their own sovereignty, some declaration of the nature of that sovereignty, and some prescribed rules for its exercise, became immediately necessary, and that declaration and those rules became at once a limitation of power, extending to every citizen the protection of every principle involved in them, until the same authority which had established should change them.

Against the evils, too, that might arise from the unrestricted control of a majority of the people over the fundamental law, — against the abuse of their power by frequent and passionate changes of the rules which limit its exercise for the time being, they had discovered the possibility of limiting the mode in which the organic law itself was to be changed. By prescribing certain forms in which the change was to be made, and especially by requiring the fact, that a change had been decreed by those having a right to make it, to be clearly and carefully ascertained by a particular evidence, they guarded the fundamental law itself against usurpation and fraud, and greatly diminished the influences of haste, prejudice, and passion.

Such was the nature of American republican liberty; not then fully understood, not then fully

developed in all the States, but yet discovered, a liberty more difficult of attainment, more elaborate in its structure, and therefore more needful of defence, than any of the other forms of constitutional freedom under which civilized man had hitherto been found.

Now, the fate of republican liberty in America, at that day, depended directly upon the preservation of some union of the States, and not simply upon the existing State institutions, or upon the desires of the people of each separate State. It is true, that their previous training and history, and their own intelligent choice, had made the States, in all their forms and principles, republican governments; and almost all of them had, at this period, written constitutions, in which the American ideal of such governments was aimed at, and more or less nearly reached. But how long were these constitutions, these republican forms, to exist? What was to secure them? Who was to stand as their guarantor and protector, and to vindicate the right of the majority to govern and alter and modify? Who was to enforce the rules which the people of a State had prescribed for their own action, when threatened by an insurgent and powerful minority? Who was to protect them against foreign invasion or domestic violence? There was no common sovereign, or supreme arbiter, to whom they could all alike appeal. There was no power upon this broad continent to whom the States could intrust the duty of preserving their institutions inviolate, except the people of the United