From the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the French Revolution the masses everywhere were influenced by the emotional, and at times hysterical, abstractions of the French encyclopedists; and that these had influenced thought in the American colonies is readily shown in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its unqualified assertion of the equality of men and the absolute right of self-determination.  The Declaration sought in its noble idealism to make the “world safe for democracy,” but the Constitution attempted the greater task of making democracy safe for the world by inducing a people to impose upon themselves salutary restraints upon majority rule.

Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution had learned a rude and terrible lesson in the anarchy that had followed the War of Independence.  They were not so much concerned about the rights of man as about his duties, and their great purpose was to substitute for the visionary idealism of a rampant individualism the authority of law.  Of the hysteria of that time, which was about to culminate in the French Revolution, there is no trace in the Constitution.

They were less concerned about Rousseau’s social contract than to restore law and order.  Hard realities and not generous and impossible abstractions interested them.  They had suffered grievously for more than ten years from misrule and had a distaste for mere phrase-making, of which they had had a satiety, for the Constitution, in which there is not a wasted word, is as cold and dry a document as a problem in mathematics or a manual of parliamentary law.  Its mandates have the simplicity and directness of the Ten Commandments, and, like the Decalogue, it consists more of what shall not be done than what shall be done.  In this freedom from empiricism and sturdy adherence to the realities of life, it can be profitably commended to all nations which may attempt a similar task.

While the Constitution apparently only deals with the practical and essential details of government, yet underlying these simply but wonderfully phrased delegations of power is a broad and accurate political philosophy, which goes far to state the “law and the prophets” of free government.

These essential principles of the Constitution may be briefly summarized as follows: 

1.

The first is representative government.

Nothing is more striking in the debates of the convention than the distrust of its members, with few exceptions, of what they called “democracy.”  By this term they meant the power of the people to legislate directly and without the intervention of chosen representatives.  They believed that the utmost concession that could be safely made to democracy was the power to select suitable men to legislate for the common good, and nothing is more striking in the Constitution than the care with which they sought to remove the powers of legislation from the direct action of the people.  Nowhere in the instrument is there a suggestion of the initiative or referendum.