James M. Beck

“ It may be doubted whether such a convention, if called to-day, either in your country or mine, could achieve like results, for in this day of unlimited publicity, when men divide not as individuals but in powerful and organized groups, a constitutional convention would, I fear, prove a witches' cauldron of class legislation and demagoguery. Is it not possible that modern democracy is in danger of strangulation by its present-day methods and ideals? ”

“ We, who belong to the British Empire, are at this moment engaged, under very different circumstances, in welding slowly and gradually the scattered fragments of the British Empire into an organic whole, which must, from the very nature of its geographical situation, have a Constitution as different from that of the British Isles, as the Constitution of the British Isles is different from that of the American States. But all three spring from one root; all three are carried out by men of like political ideals; all three are destined to promote the cause of ordered liberty throughout the world. ”

“ What admirable self-restraint! Possibly single opinions of the Supreme Court could be cited which are as long as the whole document of which they are interpreting a single phrase. This does not argue that the Constitution is an obscure document, for it would be difficult to cite any political document in the annals of mankind that was so simple and lucid in expression. There is nothing Johnsonese about its style. Every word is a word of plain speech, the ordinary meaning of which even the man in the street knows. No tautology is to be found and no attempt at ornate expression. ”

“ Constitutions, as governmental panaceas, have come and gone; but it can be said of the American Constitution, paraphrasing the noble tribute of Dr. Johnson to the immortal fame of Shakespeare, that the stream of time, which has washed away the dissoluble fabric of many other paper constitutions has left almost untouched its adamantine strength. Excepting the first ten amendments, which were virtually a part of the original charter, only nine others have been adopted in more than one hundred and thirty years. ”

“ As to the subtler and more insidious crimes against the political state, it is enough to say that graft has become a science in city, state and nation. Losses by such misapplication of public funds—piled Pelion on Ossa—no longer run in the millions but the hundreds of millions. Our city governments are, in many instances, foul cancers on the body politic; and for us to boast of having solved the problem of local self-government is as fatuous as for a strong man to exult in his health when his body is covered with running sores. ”

“ If a parliamentary form of government, immediately responsive to current opinion as registered in elections, is the great desideratum, then the fixed tenure of offices is the vulnerable Achilles-heel of our form of government. In other countries the Executive cannot survive a vote of want of confidence by the legislature. In America, the President, who is merely the Executive of the legislative will, continues for his prescribed term, though he may have wholly lost the confidence of the representatives of the people in Congress. ”

“ But when in the history of American business was there such a volume of broken faith as in the drastic deflation of 1920?
In the greater sphere of social life, we find the same revolt against the institutions which have the sanction of the past. Social laws, which mark the decent restraints of print, speech and dress, have in recent decades been increasingly disregarded. The very foundations of the great and primitive institutions of mankind—like the family, the Church, and the State—have been shaken. Nature itself is defied. ”

“ In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered, and I believe further that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. ”

“ The moral of our industrial civilization has been shattered. Work for work's sake, as the most glorious privilege of human faculties, has gone, both as an ideal and as a potent spirit. The conception of work as a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes and in all countries. ”

“ It marked, on the part of millions of men, a portentous decay of belief in representative government and its chosen organ—the ballot box. Great and powerful groups had suddenly discovered—and it may be the most portentous political discovery of the twentieth century—that the power involved in their control over the necessaries of life, as compared with the power of the voting franchise, was as a forty-two centimetre cannon to the bow and arrow. ”

“ I have faith in the inextinguishable spark of the Divine, which is in the human soul and which our complex mechanical civilization has not extinguished. Of this, the world war was in itself a proof. All the horrible resources of mechanics and chemistry were utilized to coerce the human soul, and all proved ineffectual. Never did men rise to greater heights of self-sacrifice or show a greater fidelity "even unto death." ”

“ If England and America are to act together in the coming time—and the destinies of the world are, to a very large extent, in their keeping, then they must know each other better, and, to this end, they must take a greater interest in each other's history and political institutions. My principal purpose in these lectures is to deepen the interest of this great nation in one of the very greatest and far-reaching achievements of our common race.
Americans have never lacked interest in English history; for however broad the stream of our national life, how could we ignore its chief source? ”

“ As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time by the brain and purpose of man. ”

“ To-day, man has a cinematographic brain. A thousand images are impressed daily upon the screen of his consciousness, but they are as fleeting as moving pictures in a cinema theatre. The American Press prints every year over 29,000,000,000 issues. No one can question its educational possibilities, for the best of all colleges is potentially the University of Gutenberg. If it printed only the truth, its value would be infinite; but who can say in what proportions of this vast volume of printed matter is the true and the false? The framers of the Constitution had few books and fewer newspapers. ”

“ The career of the new nation thus formed has hitherto been a rising and not a setting sun. He had in his sixty years of conspicuously useful citizenship—and perhaps no nation ever had a more untiring and unselfish servant—done more than any American to develop the American Commonwealth, but like Moses, he was destined to see the promised land only from afar, for the new Government had hardly been inaugurated, before Franklin died, as full of years as honours. ”

“ This spirit of constitutionalism in America, which culminated in the Constitution of the United States, had its institutional origin in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth. That wonderful age, which gave to the world not only Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, but also Drake, Frobisher and Raleigh, was the Anglo-Saxon reaction to the Renaissance. The spirit of man had a new birth and was breaking away from the too rigid bonds of ancient custom and authority. ”

“ The framers did not believe that the oil of anointing that was supposed to sanctify the monarch and give him infallibility had fallen upon the "multitudinous tongue" of the people to give it either infallibility or omnipotence. They believed in individualism. They were animated by a sleepless jealousy of governmental power. They believed that the greater such power, the greater the danger of its abuse. They felt that the individual could generally best work out his own salvation, and that his constant prayer to Government was that of Diogenes to Alexander: "Keep out of my sunlight." ”

“ Institutions purely democratic will sooner or later destroy liberty or civilization, or both.... The American Constitution is all sail and no anchor."
In this last commentary Lord Macaulay was clearly mistaken. As I have shown, the Constitution is not "purely democratic." It is amazing that so great a mind should have so little understood that more than any other Constitution, that of America imposes powerful restraints on democracy. The experience of a century and a quarter has shown that while the anchor may at times drag, yet it measurably holds the ship of state to its ancient moorings. ”

“ We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. ”

“ As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.
Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind. It not only accepted progress as an unmistakable fact—mistaking, however, acceleration and facilitation for progress—but in its mad folly believed in an immutable law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would propel man forward. ”

“ Is there in this day and generation a spirit of lawlessness greater or different than that that has always characterized human society? Such spirit of revolt against authority has always existed, even when the penalty of death was visited upon nearly all offences against life and property. ”

“ The judiciary, contrary to the common supposition, has no plenary power to nullify unconstitutional laws. It can only do so when there is an irreconcilable and indubitable repugnancy between a law and the Constitution; but obviously laws can be passed from motives that are anti-constitutional, and there is a wide sphere of political discretion in which many acts can be done which, while politically anti-constitutional, are not juridically unconstitutional. ”

“ I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. ”

“ Washington, however, had warmly welcomed the creation of a strong central government, and his correspondence with the leading men of the colonies for some years previously had been burdened with arguments to convince them that a mere league of States would not suffice to create a stable nation. To George Washington, soldier and statesman, is due above all men the ideal of a federated union, for without his influence—that of a noble and unselfish leader—the great result would probably never have been secured. ”

“ We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought, Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library shelves. What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!
This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man. The lust has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or destructive. Quantity, not quality, becomes the great objective. ”

“ It made the judiciary the final conscience of the nation. Your nation cherishes the same primal verities of liberty, but with you, the people in Parliament, is the final judge. We, however, are not content that a majority of the Legislature shall override inviolable individual rights, about which the judiciary is empowered to throw the solemn circle of the law. ”

“ He added:
"Give all the power to the many and they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few and they will oppress the many. Both ought, therefore, to have the power that each may defend itself against the other."
Perhaps the attitude of the members is thus best expressed by James
Madison, in the 10th of the Federalist papers:
"A pure democracy, by which I mean a State consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. ”

“ Was it strange that the early colonists, as they braved the hardships and perils of a dangerous voyage, only to be confronted in the wilderness by disease, famine and massacre, should fall back for their own government upon these primal verities of human society, and claim not only their inherited rights as Englishmen, but also the peculiar privileges of pioneers in an unconquered wilderness? ”

“ On the contrary, the whole history of the mechanical era is a persistent struggle for more pay and less work, and to-day it has culminated in world-wide ruin; for there is not a nation in civilization which is not now in the throes of economic distress, and many of them are on the verge of ruin. In my judgment, the economic catastrophe of 1921 is far greater than the politico-military catastrophe of 1914.
The results of these two tendencies, measured in the statistics of productive industry, are literally appalling. ”

“ Even England, the mother of democracies, and the most stable of all Governments in the maintenance of law, has been shaken to its very foundations in the last three years, when powerful groups of men attempted to seize the State by the throat and compel submission to their demands by threatening to starve the community. This would be serious enough if it were only the world-old struggle between capital and labour and had only involved the conditions of manual toil. ”

“ However, in England the doctrine of the common law yielded to the later doctrine of the omnipotence of Parliament, while in France the revisory power of the judiciary was terminated by the French Revolution.
The United States, however, embodied it in its form of government and thus made the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, the balance wheel of the Constitution. Without such power the Constitution could never have lasted, for neither executive officers nor legislatures are good judges of the extent of their own powers. ”

“ We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which, having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist. And we have viewed modern States all around Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our circumstances. ”

“ In this age of democracy, the average individual is too apt to recognize two constitutions—one, the constitution of the State, and the second, an unwritten constitution, to him of higher authority, under which he believes that no law is obligatory which he regards as in excess of the true powers of government. ”

“ The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it, on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the erosion of the waves. ”