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.

Even an amendment to the Constitution could not be directly proposed by
the people in the exercise of their residual power or adopted by them.
As previously said, it could only be proposed by two-thirds of the House
and the Senate, and then could only become effective, if ratified by
three-fourths of the States, acting, not by a popular vote, but through
their chosen representatives either in their legislatures or special
conventions. Thus they deni