these nationalities now exceed the whole number of Americans at the time the Constitution was framed. We have fought a war with the most powerful nation of Europe, and conducted within our own borders the longest great war since the Napoleonic epoch. Yet today our people are as free as they ever were, our government as efficient, and though the constitution has many times been overridden or disregarded, with scarcely an exception the ending of the crisis that led to such action has been followed by a contraction of powers to constitutional limits. After a hundred years of testing the national government stands to-day as the only one which has existed for a century without changes that were in effect revolutionary, and it is the only one able to enforce its laws on seventy millions of people without creating within itself a spirit of resistance and revolt.
Yet the federal constitution would have failed, as every government must fail, but for the faculty of self-government inherent in the people it nominally governs. Of what use would constitutional guarantees to the minority be, if the majority chose to disregard them? Of what use would a supreme court be, if its decisions were not acquiesced in? The constititution is alterable, the Supreme Court or the limitations can be amended at the will of the people. The constitution has been overridden, the people have disobeyed the laws. The success of our national government is due, not to its principles or structure; it is due to the fact that it gives to the majority the right of governing the land provided their laws shall be equal in operation, and that with this degree of power the majority has been content. It is, therefore, but one expression of what is the cardinal element of good government: a self-controlled people, given to excess in neither law-making nor in law-breaking.
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On September 17, 1787, the federal convention, after nearly four months of anxious work, completed the framing of the compact since known as the constitution of
