It is England’s free institutions that, in Egypt, in Hongkong, in Ceylon, in the Malay states, in India, have given the people of those dark places some of the fruits of liberty to eat for the first time in all the strange history of the oppressed and wasted Orient.  And it is our free institutions, as well as our Constitution, that in America make kings impossible, and have, for a hundred years, wrought for a larger liberty and a more popular government.

And it is the spirit of our institutions, as well as our Constitution, that will prevent the abuse of power by American authority in Porto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, or any other spot blessed by the protection of our flag.  It is our free institutions, working now by one method and now by another, after the fashion of our practical race, that are establishing order, equal laws, free speech, unpurchasable justice, and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” throughout our ocean possessions.

It is our institutional law, therefore, of which men should inquire who would know the meaning and the life of our constitutional law.  We have heard from lawyer and orator of “the Constitution,” “the letter of the Constitution,” etc.; we have listened for “our institutions,” and in vain.  And yet, is it not written that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”?

Is it not written that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”?  I respect not the expounders of constitutional law who have not learned the history of our institutions, of which the Constitution is the richest fruit, until that history is a part of their being.

I respect not that constitutional charlatanism that fastens its eye on the printed page alone, disdains our institutions as interpreting it, and refuses to consider the sources of that Constitution—­the development of our present form of government for a century and a half from the old crown charters; the English struggle for the rights of man, regulated by equal laws which preceded that; the spirit of Dutch independence, Dutch federation, and Dutch institutions working upon that, and still back to the counsels of our Teuton fathers in the German forests in the dim light of a far distant time.

If a people adopt a written instrument, you must understand that people and their institutions before you understand the writing.  You cannot separate a people and their history from a written constitution which is only a part of that history.  The same words by one people may have a different meaning used by another people.  Any writing can only be an index to the institutions of a people.

A people’s institutions are the soul of the written and unwritten law.  You must understand the French people, their history, and their institutions, before you can understand their written constitution.  You must understand the American people, our history, and our institutions, before you can understand our Constitution.