Wherever our Constitution has been weak and insufficient in its apparent expressed powers, the spirit of our institutions has given it life.  Read Marshall’s opinions; read most of our great constitutional decisions; read the whole history of American constitutional progress, if you would know the beneficent influence of our institutions on our Constitution.

Thus we see that our institutions are the preservers of our Constitution.  The doctrine of implied powers, which has saved the country and the Constitution too, has been made possible only by reading our Constitution by the light of our institutions, as Hamilton and Marshall did.

And so our security is not in the written word of the Constitution alone; it is there, of course, but it is in our institutions also which are the spirit of the Constitution, which illumine and emphasize the meaning of that noble instrument.  England has no written constitution; certain other countries have had and have now ideal written constitutions.

And yet England has steady and continuous liberty and law, while those others, even with written constitutions, frequently have had bureaucracy and military absolutism.  They had the forms of liberty and popular government in these written constitutions, but they did not have free institutions, which alone make formal constitutions living and vital things.

England, without a written constitution, is almost as free a government as ours.  Law reigns supreme.  The poorest gatherer of rags has equal rights before the bar of justice with belted earl or millionaire, and those equal rights are impartially enforced.  Neither wealth nor title are favored more than poverty or humble rank in the courts of England; and even royalty appears as witness, the same as his meanest subject.

The Government itself is subject to the will of the people; and no ministry remains in power in face of an adverse majority, or forces into law an act of which the people disapprove.  The English Parliament goes to the people as often as the Government, in any of its proposed measures, fails of a majority.  The suffrage is constantly enlarging, and the rights of labor are almost as carefully guarded by the laws of England as by ours.

England’s treatment of Ireland has been harsh, severe, unjust; and yet even there the spirit of a larger liberty in the interest of the Irish tenant, approaching state socialism, compels the landlord to sell his land whether he wants to or not, at a price fixed by others than himself, and enables the tenant to buy the land by the payment of his rent.  Tolerance, justice, and individual liberty are daily developing throughout the British Empire, instead of diminishing.

And yet England has no written constitution.  But she has institutions, free institutions, institutions similar to those we have here in America.  It is the free institutions of England that preserve and increase the liberty of Englishmen, and diminish and destroy the authority of the monarch, who is now only the personification of the nation, the emblem of the Empire.