Of this spirit one of the noblest expressions is the Constitution of the United States.  That Magna Charta has not wholly escaped the destructive tendencies of a mechanical age.  It was framed at the very end of the pastoral-agricultural age and at a time when the spirit of individualism was in full flower.  The hardy pioneers who, with their axes, made straight the pathway of an advancing civilization, were sturdy men who need not be undervalued to us of the mechanical age.  The “prairie schooner,” which met the elemental forces of Nature with the proud challenge:  “Pike’s Peak or bust,” produced as fine a type of manhood as the age which travels either in Mr. Ford’s “fliver” or the more luxurious Rolls-Royce.

The Constitution was framed in the period that marked the passing of the primitive age and the dawn of the day of the machine.  Watt had recently discovered the potency of steam vapour as a motive power; but its only use at first was for pumping water out of the mines.

When the framers of the Constitution met in high convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a Connecticut Yankee, John Fitch, was then also working in Philadelphia upon his steamboat; but twenty years were to pass before the prow of the Clermont was to part the waters of the Hudson, and nearly a half century before transportation was to be revolutionized by the utilization of Watt’s invention in the locomotive.  Of the wonders of the steamship, the railroad, the telegraphic cable, the wireless, the gasoline engine, and a thousand other mechanical miracles, the framers of the American Constitution did not even dream.

The greatest and noblest purpose of the Constitution was not alone to hold in nicest equipose the relative powers of the nation and the States, but also to maintain in the scales of justice a true equilibrium between the rights of government and the rights of an individual.  It did not believe that the State was omnipotent or infallible, and yet it proclaimed its authority within wise and just limits.  It defended the integrity of the human soul.

In other governments, these fundamental decencies of liberty rest upon the conscience of the legislature.  Under the American Constitution, they are part of the fundamental law, and, as such, enforceable by judges sworn to defend the integrity of the individual as fully as the integrity of the State.

When did a nobler “vision” inspire men in the political annals of mankind?  Without that vision to restrain each succeeding generation of Americans from the tempting excesses of political power, the American Commonwealth, with its great heterogeneous democracy, would probably perish.