The first and greatest of all its expounders, Chief Justice Marshall, said, in one of his greatest opinions, that the Constitution was—­

“intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.  To have prescribed the means by which government should in all future times execute its powers would have been to change entirely the character of the instrument and to give it the properties of a legal code.  It would have been an unwise attempt to provide by immutable rules for exigencies which, if foreseen at all, must have been foreseen dimly, and can best be provided for as they occur.”

In this great purpose of enumerating rather than defining the powers of government its framers were supremely wise.  While it was marvellously sagacious in what it provided, it was wise to the point of inspiration in what it left unprovided.

Nothing is more admirable than the self-restraint of men who, venturing upon an untried experiment, and after debating for four months upon the principles of government, were content to embody their conclusions in not more than four thousand words.  To this we owe the elasticity of the instrument.  Its vitality is due to the fact that, by usage, judicial interpretation, and, when necessary, formal amendment, it can be thus adapted to the ever-accelerating changes of the most progressive age in history, and that a people have administered the Constitution who, in the process of such adaptation, have generally shown the same spirit of conservative self-restraint as did the men who framed it.

The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it, on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the erosion of the waves.  It is rather to be likened to a floating dock, which, while firmly attached to its moorings, and not therefore the caprice of the waves, yet rises and falls with the tide of time and circumstance.

While in its practical adaptation to this complex age the men who framed it, if they could “revisit the glimpses of the moon,” would as little recognize their own handiwork as their own nation, yet they would still be able to find in successful operation the essential principles which they embodied in the document more than a century ago.

Its success is also due to the fact that its framers were little influenced by the spirit of doctrinarianism.  They were not empiricists, but very practical men.  This is the more remarkable because they worked in a period of an emotional fermentation of human thought.  The long-repressed intellect of man had broken into a violent eruption like that of a seemingly extinct volcano.