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.

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