influence of the owners of the forty millions public debt of the Confederation, to secure its validity and payment as set forth in Article VI. of the new Constitution. Ambitious motives were ascribed to men whom we are accustomed to regard as unselfish patriots. On the whole, we are led to imagine that history and biography have been cooked with the art of literary Francatellis, and that our ancestors were neither better nor worse than their descendants of this year of grace.

Human nature in the old colonial days, in our young stateshood, and in our nearly full-grown confederation has not essentially altered, nor will it, whether man was evolved from a protoplasm, an ape, or Adam. It still, as in primordial societies, seeks, office, loves power, and courts ease and adulation. Our forefathers were simply men, and neither gods nor demigods, nor are their descendants the sons of gods or of demigods. late war made cheap great men, and that fact is causing a deeper investigation into preceding history. The mythic hero is passing away with the roseate eulogist, for the hand of Truth is writing history and biography.

Is the Constitution complete?

Our

We have seen that it is amendable, and marked some omissions elsewhere, but such is the consoli

dating tendencies of the latter-day "strong government men or nationalists that it were best to let it alone. To this rule there may be two exceptions, viz.: the completion of Section 4 of Article I., so as to prohibit Congressional interference with elections, as hitherto mentioned; and the creation of a common judge in case of internal danger of revolution and separation, also hitherto mentioned. The original authors should have settled the internal improvement and tariff questions. Generalities take the place of specialties. Epigrammatic enumerations give elastical interpretation. Thus the foregoing great questions are relegated to brief clauses relating to the regulation of commerce and the laying of duties. on imports. The President should have been allowed to veto any item or items of an appropriation bill. New States without the requisite population have been admitted under the platitudinous words: "New States may be admitted into this Union." "Congress shall have power to establish post-offices and post-roads," are words so vague that Congress and Postmaster-Generals have but little regard for the sacred privacy of correspondence which is an element of free speech, nor of that liberty of the press which is the palladium of a sovereign people.

There is no limitation to departmental creations

under the "general welfare" phrase, and hence we have a Secretary of Agriculture, and a Bureau of Education, which will perhaps in time evolve a Secretary of Education. Without constitutional warrant the agents of the States are made pedagogic, piscatory, entomologic, and herbivorous! Commissioners of bureaux are increasing all for the "general welfare.”

So much time was spent by the convention of 1787 in the bitter contest beween the large and small States, that the fatigued members were eager to adjourn and go home. This, together with other conflicting opinions, accounts for the omissions and generalities.

Many deputies had quietly left the convention, discontented with some of its legislation. The signers, headed by General Washington, dined together, and congratulated each other on the work accomplished in little less than five months. The time was too short to lay the foundations so broad and deep as to maintain a superstructure which should defy the centuries of change. The structure is a mixture of Doric, Corinthian, Ionic, and Composite. It ought to have been Doric.

CONCLUDING WORDS.

Such is the Constitution of the United States of America. It is not jure divino-only the best

that human ingenuity and compromise could devise. For more than a century it has lived. Happily the war between the States made no structural changes. The principles of the best of the framers, supplemented by the Bill of Rights, still vitalize it.

This parchment has been a model for Mexican, Central American, and South American States, some of whom are named for these United States, the last being Brazil, the Latins thereof giving us a new lesson on progressive statesmanship, for they overturned the throne of the immemorial Braganzas, abolished slavery, separated church and State, established freedom of conscience and of speech, and on the ruins of an empire erected a confederation of States by a peaceful and bloodless revolution.

Free institutions are recreative. Apart from the parchment compact between the States of our Union, there is something in our varied soil and climate which transforms the alien settlers, and which beautifies and ennobles the faces and forms of their offspring. Thus by a process natural and political, the free sovereign and independent citizen is both the result of soil and climate, and of the benign institutions founded by the men of the Revolution.

The hand that pens these concluding words

has written the axiomatic legend that patriotism is reverence for the old and the tried, not for the new and untried. The indisposition of the more thoughtful people of the States to give the United States more power by amending the Constitution is a guarantee, at least in our generation, that paternalism which is empire shall not be tolerated.

The cohesion of force is temporary. Integration is soon followed by disintegration. Fewer laws and more principles will weld together the States and the people in a common bond of consent. In that single word consent lies the vital perpetuity of our States-Union.

Repudiate the amendments to the Constitution which ignorant, ambitious, or designing men in Congress draft every session in the interest of nationalism. Let the Supreme Court of the United States understand that there is no national government" on this continent, but confederated sovereignties, and bid the judges cease their encroachment on the reserved rights of the States. Demand of Congress a rigid adherence to the Constitution in every act of legislation.

The grand Christ precept, "As ye sow so shall ye reap," is the universal law of moral and political being. Heaven help us to sow well for ourselves and for that posterity to whose hands will