but many minor ones swelled the list. The dread of the legislative branch was so strong that Congress itself, balanced and checked though it was to be, was restrained from certain legislation. The misuse of power by the state legislatures had ended, as it always does, in loss of power.
To ask a majority to limit their law-making ability, both in their state and national legislatures, so that they could no longer abuse the minority, and to ask them to part with the direct delegation of three-fourths of the general government, was a daring proposition. The state officials, as the creatures of the legislatures, were naturally opposed to it; while nothing but the previous abuses from which the country was still suffering would ever have made it possible that the constitution would have been accepted by the majority; and even those were insufficient to make the people take the new constitution readily.[1] Much argument and many devices were needed in most of the states to obtain its ratification. To aid in its adoption The Federalist was written, and of that nine-months' campaign it was a distinct factor.
⁂
How far the government thus drafted and thus commented upon has fulfilled the intention of the men who framed it in the federal convention and the predictions of the men who analyzed it in The Federalist, could be reviewed at much length, but only a few results need be touched upon.
There can be no question that the national government has given to the minority a greater protection than it has enjoyed anywhere else in the world, save in those countries where the minority is a specially privileged aristocracy and the right of suffrage is limited. So absolute have property rights been held by the Supreme Court, that it even, by the Dred Scott decision, in effect made the whole country a land of slavery, because the
- ↑ John Quincy Adams said that the constitution was "extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation."
