Abbe Sieyes, at another, Mr. Bentham set up a laboratory to supply any number to order, for any occasion or any people; but of a political system well adapted to a people; capable of happily blending with their customs and habits; accommodating itself to their interests; operating with facility in successive internal and external changes; and resisting, with a still accumulating vigor, the thousand tendencies to decay and dissolution inherent in all human productions. The difficulty is to propel the machinery with the adequate moving principles, and at the same time so to distribute, limit and adjust the powers that they shall act in harmony, and so adapt them that the national energies shall corroborate, and be reciprocally corroborated by, those of the government.

The formation of this complicated piece of political machinery, upon one comprehensive plan has been attempted in respect to but a very small part of the constitutions now in actual adininistration. And every permanent government has its constitution, though it may not be formally drawn out on parchment and solemnly ratified. All governments, from the most absolute despotism to the merest democracy, are administered upon certain principles. The fundamental law of a nation may be the present will of one or many, according to the most literal interpretation; but we are not thence necessarily to conclude that this will can be the mere capricious or random volition of the governing one or the governing multitude. On the contrary there are, in almost every government, certain directing and controlling principles, according to which this will must act. Now, whether the organization be simple, as in the instances just given, or complicated, as in more mixed and compounded governments, as are those of Great Britain and the United States, still we shall find a greater or less number of principles by which the action of the political machinery is determined. The great object of constructing a constitution is the fixing upon these principles, and making them permanent.

In the case of a government, as in that of a machine, the more simple it is, the more easy it is to assign its principles. But here the parallel ceases, for a simple machine may be an adequate and perfect one, but a simple government is a rude, imperfect and inadequate one. Yet it may be the only one adapted to certain nations, where, if they should undertake to

create one more complicated, the machinery would, by being unskilfully or unfaithfully managed, be soon entangled and rent in pieces by its own operation. Where this is the case it does not prove the badness of the machinery in itself, but it shows that it is not suited to the customs, characters, social conditions and relations of that particular community. At certain stages of the social progress, nations seem to be capable of nothing more in the form of government than merely the rules that may be agreed upon among soldiers united under a chief. Since the times of patriarchal government, this has been the most frequent rudimental form of a political system. Savage tribes and semi-civilized nations, like the South Americans, seem to be incapable of passing beyond this kind of government. The people of some parts of the United States, even show a great tendency to relapse into a social state in which only such a kind of government, or substitute for a government, could be maintained. A majority of a nation, or even the whole nation, may feel the deepest interest in establishing a better system, and still not possess the skill and social virtue requisite to its adoption and management.

A country so situated may be the scene of a series of revolutions, or, in other words, the administration may be handed over from one faction to another, and so indeed it usually happens; but even in cases of this description there will probably be found some certain and pretty uniform principles that determine the administration. The rulers for the time may, for instance, always respect certain religious or political prejudices. But these principles will be very few. Those that determine the administration of permanent despotisms will be more numerous; but still very few in comparison with those of a mixed government in which the powers are distributed and reciprocally counterpoised among many coordinate, and in some respects. independent functionaries. England, without any formal written constitution, merely from its political organization and from usage, has a constitution as well, probably better, defined than ours, since it has been operating upon substantially its present principles for a century and a half; and accordingly a specific application of its principles has been made to more numerous But whether we take the English government, or any other of any considerable complexity of structure, and having

cases.

any thing more than a mere rudimental character, we shall find, after the most attentive study of it, that we shall be able to lay down and define only its most general and fundamental principles. So in constructing a government, though, it will be obvious to the framers that it must be made congenial to the character of the people for whom it is intended, and admit of application to the almost infinite variety of cases that may arise under it, yet the most that can be done in framing it, is to make a general sketch, a mere outline.

To draw such an outline, and in such a manner that it might be filled up year after year, and still preserve its proportions and distinctive character, was the great work undertaken by the framers of our constitution, and under circumstances by no means the most encouraging. Thirteen different political communities, with diversity of constitutions, laws, and interests, mutually repelled from each other by jealousies, were to be moulded into one nation, by their own consent, with the reciprocal sacrifice of their conflicting opinions, and what they might conceive to be their conflicting interests. What aggravated the difficulty of the undertaking, they felt, and very naturally too, a grudging distrust in assigning powers to a supreme authority in the place of one they had just shaken off, after a fearful struggle. The evils of disunion and the experience of the inefficacy of the old confederation, it is true, supplied the strongest arguments and motives in favor of forming a government of sufficient strength to hold the States together. But the obstacles were great enough to appal the most sanguine and courageous minds. The prospect seemed, at most, to justify the hope of repairing and perhaps slightly improving the dilapidated confederation; of making a general treaty instead of a general government. And there are not wanting those who now maintain that this was all that was in fact accomplished; that the constitution is only another amphyctionic league depending wholly on the continued concurrence of each of its members; who maintain that no government was in fact formed; and that the United States are not a nation, but twenty-five different nations associated in a political copartnership during the pleasure of each. But this was not what the framers of the constitution contemplated; nor was it so accepted by the people, in adopting it. All the proceedings in framing it, the language of the instru

ment itself, the contemporaneous expositions, and the whole administration under it for forty-five years, concur in holding it forth as a fundamental law, and the result of its adoption as a government. If it was merely a treaty, a league, a con-tract, revocable at the will of any of the parties to it, or at most the confederation reorganized, its formation and adoption were matters of small glory; the enthusiasm with which its establishment was hailed was a weak infatuation; and the eulogies that have been pronounced upon it are silly bombast. The magnificent fabric, to rear which all the energies and all the magnanimity of the nation were evoked, dwindles into a pasteboard palace that may be crushed by the slightest shock; and after a delusion of forty-five years we are for the first time restored to our senses, to perceive, in its real diminutiveness, the petty result of such grand efforts of great men, and, what we mistook for, a great nation, and to be mortified at the exultation. of the whole people of these States for all this period in a childish illusion. Upon this construction the wonder is not at the great achievement in framing and adopting the constitution, but at the total delusion under which it was framed, and adopted, and has been so long administered, and at its continuing in existence and effective operation for a period so long as it took to establish it. But if the constitution is what it purports to be on the face of it, according to its uniform language and spirit from beginning to end, a fundamental law-or, according to the Virginia style, if that be more acceptable, if it be a compact, league, treaty, stipulation, covenant or bargain, but irrevocable and inextinguishable except by the power which formed it originally, the concurring will of the people of the several States- if the result of its adoption was the compounding and consolidating the States into one nation, to the extent of the powers conferred upon the general government, then its construction and adoption. were truly a glorious work and a great epoch in political history.

The interpretation and practical application of this instrument are necessarily of an importance corresponding to that of the instrument itself, since, as we have already remarked, a constitution can, at the most, embrace only the general outlines and most leading principles of the system. Without a comprehensive view of these principles in the administration of the gov ernment, and consistent and harmonious deductions from them,

and a scrupulous adherence to their true spirit, disorder and confusion must be the consequence, and so the government either be changed, or made to dwindle away to its dissolution. The construction and application of the principles of the constitution, are the proper subject for the mightiest intellectual power, guided by the greatest prudence, and assisted by the amplest knowledge, and its maintenance and perpetuation are as much jeopardized by a narrow, short-sighted, confused, inadequate interpretation, as from any direct attempt to overthrow it. Such interpretations tend to divest the government of its powers, until it becomes too weak to sustain itself: they tend to inconsistency and contradiction, and consequently to substitute, in the place of permanent principles, the present discretion. or opinion of its administrators for the time being, or, in other words, to give it practically an arbitrary character. Those who defend a comprehensive, consistent interpretation, are advocates of the freedom of the citizen, since they insist upon an adherence to certain rules by which the administration, in its various departments, shall be governed. And such rules can be established only by the broadest and most comprehensive views, and a deep insight into all the consequences of the doctrines to be espoused. We do not mean to say that the interpretation which gives the most extensive powers to the government is necessarily, in all cases, the true one, but that it is essential to the maintenance of the government as one of fixed rules, that they should be such as to give the powers operation as those of a government; and that those who are constantly urging a different interpretation are actuated by a spirit hostile to our political institutions.

It has so happened that those, into whose hands the practical exposition of the constitution has mostly fallen, have been among the most enlightened and worthy of our citizens, to whom we owe almost as much as to its original framers. Before the government went into operation all the provisions of the constitution were critically analyzed and lucidly expounded by General Hamilton, Mr. Madison, and Mr. Jay, in the numbers of Federalist. The provisions of this great charter have also frequently been subjected to investigation and analysis in the Supreme Court of the United States. The mere usage of forty-five years is also an authority for the construction of the