evil days which followed 1865, the spirit of enlightened conservatism win assert itself here and in the sister States of what was once the Confederacy; and again it will prevail. In the future, as in the past, you in South Carolina at least will cling to what in 1876 proved the ark of your social and political salvation.
Taking another step in the discussion of changes, the Constitution is founded on that well-known distribution and allocation of powers first theoretically suggested by Montesquieu. There is a division, accompanied by a mutual limitation of authority, through the Judiciary, the Executive, and the Legislative. As respects this allocation, how would I modify that instrument? I freely say that the tendency of my thought, based on observation, is to conservatism. I have never yet in a single instance found that when the people of this or any other country accustomed to parliamentary government desired a thing, they failed to obtain it within a reasonable limit of time. Hasty changes are wisely deprecated; but I think I speak within limitation when I say that neither in the history of Great Britain,—the mother of Parliaments—nor in the history of the United States, has any modification which the people, on sober second thought, have considered to be for the best, long been deferred. Action, revolutionary in character, has not, as a rule, been needful, or, when taken, proved salutary. This is a record and result that no careful student of our history will, I take it, deny.
Such being the case, so far as our Judiciary is concerned,
