have not had their value in American national history, and were not the expression of an essential element in the composition and the ideal of the American nation.  The security of private property and personal liberty, and a proper distribution of activity between the local and the central governments, demanded at that time, and within limits still demand, adequate legal guarantees.  It remains none the less true, however, that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.  Such is not the case with the government organized under the Federal Constitution.  In respect to certain fundamental provisions, which necessarily receive the most rigid interpretation on the part of the courts, it is practically unmodifiable.  A very small percentage of the American people can in this respect permanently thwart the will of an enormous majority, and there can be no justification for such a condition on any possible theory of popular Sovereignty.  This defect has not hitherto had very many practical inconveniences, but it is an absolute violation of the theory and the spirit of American democratic institutions.  The time may come when the fulfillment of a justifiable democratic purpose may demand the limitation of certain rights, to which the Constitution affords such absolute guarantees; and in that case the American democracy might be forced to seek by revolutionary means the accomplishment of a result which should be attainable under the law.

It was, none the less, a great good thing that the Union under the new Constitution triumphed.  Americans have more reason to be proud of its triumph than of any other event in their national history.  The formation of an effective nation out of the thirteen original colonies was a political achievement for which there was no historical precedent.  Up to that time large countries had been brought, if not held, together by military force or by a long process of gradually closer historical association.  Small and partly independent communities had combined one with another only on compulsion.  The necessities of joint defense might occasionally drive them into temporary union, but they would not stay united.  They preferred a precarious and tumultuous independence to a combination with neighboring communities, which brought security at the price of partial subordination and loyal cooeperation.  Even the provinces which composed the United Netherlands never submitted to an effective political union during the active and vital period of their history.  The small American states had apparently quite as many reasons for separation as the small Grecian and Italian states.  The military necessities of the Revolution had welded them only into a loose and feeble confederation, and a successful revolution does not constitute a very good precedent