The American Commonwealth - Viscount James Bryce

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Steam and electricity have knit the various parts of the country closely together, have made each state and group of states more dependent on its neighbours, have added to the matters in which the whole country benefits by joint action and uniform legislation. The power of the national government to stimulate or depress commerce and industries by legislation, whether in matters of currency and finance, or on the tariff, or on the means of transportation, has given it a wide control over the material prosperity of the Union, till “the people, and especially the trading and manufacturing classes, came to look more and more to the national capital for what enlists their interests, and less and less to the capital of their own State. . . . It is the nation and not the State that is present to the imagination of the citizens as sovereign, even in the States of Jefferson and Calhoun. . . . The Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was, can no longer be the party watchword. There is a new Union, with new grand features, but with new engrafted evils.” 2 There has grown up a pride in the national flag, and in the national government as representing national unity. In the North there is gratitude to that government as the power that saved the Union in the Civil War; in the South a sense of the strength which Congress and the president then exerted; in both a recollection of the immense scope which the war powers took and might take again. All over the country there is a great army of federal officeholders who look to Washington as the centre of their hopes and fears. As the modes in and by which these and other similar causes can work are evidently not exhausted, it is clear that the development of the Constitution as between the nation and the states has not yet stopped, and present appearances suggest that the centralizing tendency will continue to prevail.

      How does the inquiry we have been conducting affect the judgment to be passed upon the worth of rigid constitutions, i.e., of written instruments of government emanating from an authority superior to that of the ordinary legislature? The question is a grave one for European countries, which seem to be passing from the older or flexible to the newer or rigid type of constitutions.

      A European reader who has followed the facts stated in the last foregoing chapters may be inclined to dismiss the question summarily. “Rigid constitutions,” he will say, “are on your own showing a delusion and a sham. The American Constitution has been changed, is being changed, will continue to be changed, by interpretation and usage. It is not what it was even thirty years ago; who can tell what it will be thirty years hence? If its transformations are less swift than those of the English Constitution, this is only because England has not even yet so completely democratized herself as had America nearly a century ago, and therefore there has been more room for change in England. If the existence of the fundamental Constitution did not prevent violent stretches of executive power during the war, and of legislative power after as well as during the war, will not its paper guarantees be trodden under foot more recklessly the next time a crisis arrives? It was intended to protect not only the states against the central government, not only each branch of the government against the other branches, but the people against themselves, that is to say, the people as a whole against the impulses of a transient majority. What becomes of this protection when you admit that even the Supreme Court is influenced by public opinion, which is only another name for the reigning sentiment of the moment? If every one of the checks and safeguards contained in the document may be overset, if all taken together may be overset, where are the boasted guarantees of the fundamental laws? Evidently it stands only because it is not at present assailed. It is like the walls of Jericho, tall and stately, but ready to fall at the blast of the trumpet. It is worse than a delusion: it is a snare; for it lulls the nation into a fancied security, seeming to promise a stability for the institutions of government, and a respect for the rights of the individual, which are in fact baseless. A flexible constitution like that of England is really safe, because it practises no similar deceit, but by warning good citizens that the welfare of the commonwealth depends always on themselves and themselves only, stimulates them to constant efforts for the maintenance of their own rights and the deepest interests of society.”

      This statement of the case errs as much in one direction by undervaluing, as common opinion errs by overvaluing, the stability of rigid constitutions. They do not perform all that the solemnity of their wording promises. But they are not therefore useless.

      To expect any form of words, however weightily conceived, with whatever sanctions enacted, permanently to restrain the passions and interests of men is to expect the impossible. Beyond a certain point, you cannot protect the people against themselves any more than you can, to use a familiar American expression, lift yourself from the ground by your own bootstraps. Laws sanctioned by the overwhelming physical power of a despot, laws sanctioned by supernatural terrors whose reality no one doubted, have failed to restrain those passions in ages of slavery and superstition. The world is not so much advanced that in this age laws, even the best and most venerable laws, will of themselves command obedience. Constitutions which in quiet times change gradually, peacefully, almost imperceptibly, must in times of revolution be changed more boldly, some provisions being sacrificed for the sake of the rest, as mariners throw overboard part of the cargo in a storm in order to save the other part with the ship herself. To cling to the letter of a constitution when the welfare of the country for whose sake the constitution exists is at stake, would be to seek to preserve life at the cost of all that makes life worth having— propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

      Nevertheless the rigid Constitution of the United States has rendered, and renders now, inestimable services. It opposes obstacles to rash and hasty change. It secures time for deliberation. It forces the people to think seriously before they alter it or pardon a transgression of it. It makes legislatures and statesmen slow to overpass their legal powers, slow even to propose measures which the Constitution seems to disapprove. It tends to render the inevitable process of modification gradual and tentative, the result of admitted and growing necessities rather than of restless impatience. It altogether prevents some changes which a temporary majority may clamour for, but which will have ceased to be demanded before the barriers interposed by the Constitution have been overcome.

      It does still more than this. It forms the mind and temper of the people. It strengthens their conservative instincts, their sense of the value of stability and permanence in political arrangements. It trains them to habits of legality as the law of the Twelve Tables trained the minds of the educated Romans. It makes them feel that to comprehend their supreme instrument of government is a personal duty, incumbent on each one of them. It familiarizes them with, it attaches them by ties of pride and reverence to, those fundamental truths on which the Constitution is based.

      These are enormous services to render to any free country, but above all to one which, more than any other, is governed not by the men of rank or wealth or special wisdom, but by public opinion, that is to say, by the ideas and feelings of the people at large. In no country were swift political changes so much to be apprehended, because nowhere has material growth been so rapid and immigration so enormous. In none might the political character of the people have seemed more likely to be bold and prone to innovation, because their national existence began with a revolution, which even now lies only a century and a half behind. That none has ripened into a more prudently conservative temper may be largely ascribed to the influence of the famous instrument of 1789, which, enacted in and for a new republic, summed up so much of what was best in the laws and customs of an ancient monarchy.

       Nature of the American State

      From the study of the national government, we may go on to examine that of the several states which make up the Union. This is the part of the American political system which has received least attention both from foreign and from native writers. Finding in the federal president, cabinet, and Congress a government superficially resembling those of their

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