Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/436

4l6 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Every people under a written Constitution must experience diffi- culties of administration that are unknown to nations like Great Britain, which are unfettered by legal restraints imposed by former generations. It is part of the price it pays for liberty, that new con- ditions must be dealt with, in fundamentals, under old laws. The people of the United States, when they framed this Consti- tution for themselves and their posterity, had they contemplated a day when the Executive might negotiate a treaty of cession embrac- ing an archipelago in the waters of Asia, might have relaxed some of the restrictions which they were laying down to limit the legisla- tive power. They might also have strengthened and multiplied them. They may now be asked to declare their will, through the slow process of constitutional amendment ; but imtil they . speak, we must take the Constitution as it is. Simeon E. Baldwin.