At a time when slavery was yet universally recognized, the framers of the Constitution saw they must make some concession to its existence, or forego the constitution of a national republic. Unable to decree the abolition of slavery, but anticipating its speedy extinction, they did secure the exclusion of slavery by name or express sanction from the charter of a free people. How their hopes failed, I shall show in the next chapter; but it is not for us to doubt their wisdom, or impeach their integrity. In making a new chemical compound, it may be important to eliminate it from some deleterious substance: but, in experimenting for this, it is not worth while to begin with blowing up the laboratory and its operators; better wait till retorts, walls, and bomb-proofs are strong enough to risk the explosion. Had Luther separated Church from State, and taken sides with the peasants in their war, how different might have been the fate of Germany and the Reformation! Yes; but did not Luther do enough? Did not our fathers do enough? Or are we so ignoble as to

and none too strongly. Our grievance against Great Britain during the war of 1861-65 was not a financial one. The payment of damages caused by allowing the Alabama to put out from an English port was indeed a question to be settled between the two governments; but, in common with all high-minded Americans abroad, I felt humiliated when the gorernment of the United States brought before the Geneva tribunal the preposterous demand for "indirect claims." This was absurd enough as a bit of exaggerated rhetoric from the lips of Mr. Sumner, - what Mr. Benton would have called "a stump-speech in the belly of the bill:" but from the government as a formal demand, if seriously meant, it was childish; if meant for effect, it was a bit of chicanery grotesque and mortifying to the last degree. We have not yet recovered in Europe from this oficial proclamation of our mercenary" character. No money was not our grievance against Great Britain: it was that she went back on her own traditions of freedom and amity. She was allied to us by treaty; yet, while our accredited ambassador was known to be on his way, she made haste to give the Rebellion a belligerent status by the proclamation of "neutrality." England had in many ways admonished us of the evil of slavery; yet when known antislavery men assured her that the Rebellion was in the interest of slavery, and must prove its doom, their voices were not heard. We had in Britain many true and noble friends, whose fidelity to freedom and to international comity deserves all praise. But the visible currents of English feeling set strongly toward secession, and there was no prompt national uprising of Christian England in sympathy for our cause. Perhaps it was better for us that we went through the struggle without that sympathy; but it was not so well for England in the estimate of thoughtful and Christian Americans. Her moral failure in this great emergency of Freedom was to us a wonder and a grief. Thus much the simple truth demands of one whose whole life attests that he has never spoken ill of England. The record must speak for itself. A just recognition of past mistakes may be the surest preparation for good understanding and cordial comity in the future.

complain that they did not leave us a perfect society, in which we might sit at our ease, with nothing to test our patriotism, or discipline our manhood? Over the grave of slavery, a grave so vast that it swallowed up five hundred thousand sons of America who should have been brothers, a grave in which, O brethren of the South! my body and blood are buried with yours, let us be just to the memory of the fathers, and strike hands in perpetual fealty to their Constitution of freedom!

The other point in which the wisdom of the convention of 1787 shone supreme in that which it rejected was its steadfast refusal to admit into the new Constitution the principle of a confederation of States. There was already such a confederation, which members of this convention. had assisted to frame. The Congress of that confederation was then in session: the members of the convention sat as the delegates of States, and voted by States, the majority of each delegation casting the single vote of their State; and yet this council of States, in providing a Constitution for the future, repudiated the very basis upon which itself was formed. One has but to read, side by side, the preambles to the Confederation and the Constitution, to mark this significant change. The first opens as follows: "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia." Art. III." The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever." Here is no constitution, no body knit together as one being, its every part held and swayed by an inward law of life and growth, but a mere pact, a pasteboard body without brain or heart, the limbs articulated with strings, which, though capable of pulling all together, have a propensity to individual jerks, at all times hang loosely, and may at

any moment snap asunder. It can be safely predicated of such a body, that it won't work just when you most want it to. This confederate body, pieced together by "Articles," never had an executive head, but in the recess of Congress was represented by "a committee of the States."

Turn from this to the grand announcement that heralds the government under which the United States have lived since the 4th of March, 1789: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure 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." Ah! we feel here the heart of the nation, beating with the consciousness of unity and of imperishable life; beating with the strong instinct of right, and the calm spirit of peace; beating_with_even pulse for the good of all; beating with high hope for us and our children, for liberty and man.

This change from a treaty of States to a national Constitution was made with the utmost deliberation, and was contested at every step by the adherents of the old notion. of a confederacy. After some preliminary skirmishing in the committee of the whole, this fundamental question between the federal plan and the national plan was the subject of debate for five consecutive days, a debate in which most of the leading minds of the convention took part, and Randolph, Hamilton, and Madison made those great and now historic speeches that settled the government upon the basis of national unity. The debate ranged about two conflicting propositions. The first, moved by Mr. Patterson in the interest of the smaller States, "Resolved, That the Articles of Confederation ought to be so revised, corrected, and enlarged, as to render the Federal Constitu tion adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union:" the second, moved by Mr. Randolph, and recommended by the committee of the whole, "Resolved, That a national government ought to be established, consisting of a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary." There was no attempt to blink the issue raised by these rival propositions. It was seen from

1

the first that there could be no compromise between the two plans. Mr. Lansing said, "That of Mr. Patterson sustains the sovereignty of the respective States; that of Mr. Randolph destroys it." And Mr. Randolph himself said, "The true question is, whether we shall adhere to the federal plan, or introduce the national plan." Each plan was searched and sifted by an exhaustive debate, at the close of which the convention resolved "that the government of the United States ought to consist of a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary," and so gave the coup de grace to the expiring confederacy. That the convention so interpreted its own act is clear from the letter of Washington, its president, to the president of Congress, in submitting the Constitution to that body: "It is obviously impracticable, in the federal government of these States, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all. Individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. . . . In all our deliberations on this subject, we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us, the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence." On the 17th September, 1787, the convention finished its work: on the 28th September, Congress transmitted the new Constitution to the legisla tures of the several States, "in order to be submitted to a convention of delegates chosen in each State by the people thereof." And now this new plan of government, as it was universally regarded, had to undergo the ordeal of these popular tribunals. The battle that had been fought out in the Federal convention was renewed in each State convention, and raged with peculiar violence in the State of New York, where Hamilton, Madison, and Jay did such sturdy service to the cause of national government by their essays under the title of "The Federalist," which soon took rank with the higher statesmanship of the day. At length, by the close of July, 1788, ten nonths after its adoption in convention, the new Constitution was ratified by eleven States, - Delaware, Pennsyl

1 Madison Papers, ii. 858-909.

vania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York. North Carolina held aloof till Nov. 21, 1789; and on May 20, 1790, spunky little Rhody entered into the family, not seeing how she could longer maintain her sovereignty alone. Thus the league resting upon sovereign States was repudiated for the Union emerging out of the sovereignty of the people. The issue raised by war in 1861 was settled by wisdom more than seventy years before; and as we think upon the dignity, the consistency, the vigor, and the glory of the nation as manifested through its Constitution, let us not forget how much we owe to the prudence, the patience, the patriotism, of the convention of 1787, and, above all, of Alexander Hamilton of New York, and James Madison and Edmund Randolph of Virginia.1

Of the positive virtues of the Constitution it is less necessary that I should speak in detail; yet I must point out how each of its leading provisions for the actual government is, at the same time, a protection against a peril that might have destroyed the republic. To have admitted in the Constitution a right of secession would have brought on board a case of dynamite with a clockwork adjusted to explode it, and blow up the ship of state within a given number of days. But so vigilant were the framers of the Constitution against inflammable and explosive material, that nothing could be smuggled on board under an evasive manifest, but every article was subjected to a thorough search.2 Popular government was to be maintained, but the risks of popular excitement and vacillation, and of mobocracy, to be guarded against: so the people are left in possession of local government

1 Though at the last Mr. Randolph declined to sign the Constitution as a whole, it was he that first introduced and advocated in the convention the plan of a national government.

66

2 In Switzerland there exists among the cantons a federal pact, without the national unity that characterizes the government of the United States. In 1846 a separate league was formed between the Catholic cantons, known as the Sonderbund, and based upon the doctrine that the federal pact was a mere alliance of independent and sovereign states, each of them at liberty to put their own construction upon it, and break it whenever they chose." This pretence was resisted with the whole strength of the Diet; and Mr. Grote, in his Letters on the Politics of Switzerland, has shown that it would lead to the annihilation of all government.