have avoided such misinterpretation only by an extraordinary display of political insight and a heroic superiority to natural prejudice.  Their error sinks into insignificance compared with the enormous service which they rendered to the American people and the American cause.  Without their help there might not have been any American nation at all, or it might have been born under a far darker cloud of political suspicion and animosity.  The instrument which they created, with all its faults, proved capable of becoming both the organ of an efficient national government and the fundamental law of a potentially democratic state.  It has proved capable of flexible development both in function and in purpose, and it has been developed in both these directions without any sacrifice of integrity.

Its success has been due to the fact that its makers, with all their apprehensions about democracy, were possessed of a wise and positive political faith.  They believed in liberty.  They believed that the essential condition of fruitful liberty was an efficient central government.  They knew that no government could be efficient unless its powers equaled its responsibilities.  They were willing to trust to such a government the security and the welfare of the American people.  The Constitution has proved capable of development chiefly as the instrument of these positive political ideas.  Thanks to the theory of implied powers, to the liberal construction of the Supreme Court during the first forty years of its existence, and to the results of the Civil War the Federal government has, on the whole, become more rather than less efficient as the national political organ of the American people.  Almost from the start American life has grown more and more national in substance, in such wise that a rigid constitution which could not have been developed in a national direction would have been an increasing source of irritation and protest.  But this reenforcement of the substance of American national life has, until recently, found an adequate expression in the increasing scope and efficiency of the Federal government.  The Federalists had the insight to anticipate the kind of government which their country needed; and this was a great and a rare achievement—­all the more so because they were obliged in a measure to impose it on their fellow-countrymen.

There is, however, another face to the shield.  The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears.  It was wrought both as the organ of the national interest and as the bulwark of certain individual and local rights.  The Federalists sought to surround private property, freedom of contract, and personal liberty with an impregnable legal fortress; and they were forced by their opponents to amend the original draft of the Constitution in order to include a still more stringent bill of individual and state rights.  Now I am far from pretending that these legal restrictions