THE NATION AND THE CONSTITUTION never obtain permanent acceptance. The Constitution performs its chief service when it holds the nation back from hasty and passionate action, and compels it to inves tigate, consider, and weigh until it is made sure that the proposed action does not embody the passion of the hour, but the settled purpose of the years. A changeless constitution becomes the protector not only of vested rights but of vested wrongs. As Bacon says, " He that will not apply new remedies must accept new evils, for time is the greatest innovator. ... A froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as any innovation. " A constitution which fixedly restrains a people from cor recting their actual evils, becomes associated in the popular mind with the evils them selves. When it performs that role, as ours once did, it becomes in the estimation of reformers a "compact with hell," and enlightened statesmen appeal from its pro visions to a "higher law." But it is now insisted with a zeal such as has not been heard since John Taylor of Carolina, that if the Constitution is to be changed it must be done in the manner which the instrument itself provides for its amendment. To say that, however, is to say that it shall not be changed at all, for we are taught by a century of our history that the Constitution can no longer be thus amended. Since 1804 more than two thousand amendments have been proposed. Many of them have been the subject of much public discussion, have found a place in party platform; some have received the requisite vote of one branch of Congress; but with the exception of the war amendments, all have failed of adoption. The first twelve amendments may be regarded as merely formal, or as the result of the forces which produced the instrument itself. It required the fierce passions aroused by the Civil War to bring about the only direct amendment of the Constitution which has occured apart from the period of its adoption. Even these amendments could
597
not have secured the requisite number of States had it not been for the coercion of military power and political influence such as every lover of our country will hope can never be again employed for such a purpose. This, however, was not the worst feature of those amendments. The fierce passion necessary to secure their adoption was embodied in the amendments themselves. As a result they have been nullified in some of their most important provisions, and as to other features found in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court in order to prevent their confounding our whole system of national and local government, was compelled in the Slaughter House Cases to resort to a construction which did violence to the language of the amendment, and defeated the avowed purpose of the men who employed that language. The most impressive lesson taught by the war amend ments is that the Constitution cannot be amended in the manner which it provides except as the result of passions which wholly disqualify the nation for the work of con stitutional amendment. The vast enlargement of our country has made the method of amendment provided by the fathers far more difficult than they contemplated at the time. They also be lieved that they had forever foreclosed the possibility of government by party, and the inauguration of that system has made the plan which they devised unworkable, for any amendment which is proposed by one party encounters the opposition of the other. If objection does not exist to the subject matter, it is called forth by partisan considerations. No amend ment, therefore, is possible except when one party controls the legislatures of threefourths of the states, and a two -thirds majority in Congress. This condition has not existed since the early part of the last century, nor is it ever likely to occur again. But probably the greatest force opposed to constitutional amendment is the fear of radicalism by the large business interests
