countless on-coming
generations, that the men of '87 were equal to the stupendous
emergency. Regardless of instructions, expressed or implied,
the master spirits of the Convention, looking beyond local prejudices
and State environment, and appealing to time for vindication, with
a ken that now seems more than human, discerned the safety, the
well-being, the glory of their countrymen, bound up in a general
Government of plenary powers, a Government "without a seam in its
garment, to foreign nations."

To this end the proposition submitted by Paterson of New Jersey,
in the early sittings of the Convention, for a mere enlargement of
the powers of the Confederation, was decisively rejected. With
the light that could be gleaned from the pages of Montesquieu, the
suggestive lessons to be drawn from the fate of the short-lived
republics whose wrecks lay along the pathway of history, and from the
unwritten Constitution of the mother country, as their only guides,
the leaders of the Convention were at once in the difficult role
of constructive statesmen. The Herculean task to which with
unwearied effort they now addressed themselves was that of "builders"
of the Constitution; the establishers, for the ages, of the
fundamental law for a free people.

One of the perils which early beset the Convention, and whose
spectre haunted its deliberations till the close, was the hostility
engendered by the dread and jealousy of the smaller toward the
larger States. This fact will in some measure explain what in
later years have been denominated the anomalies of the Constitution.
To a correct understanding of the motives of the builders, and
an appreciation of their marvellous accomplishment, it must not be
forgotten that "The foundations of the Constitution were laid in
compromise." The men of '87 had but recently emerged from the
bloody conflict through which they had escaped the domination of
kingly power. With the tyranny of George the Third yet burning in
their memories, it is not to be wondered that the Revolutionary
patriots of the less populous States were loath to surrender rights,
deemed, by them, secure under their local governments; that they
dreaded the establishment of what they apprehended might prove
an overshadowing--possibly unlimited--central authority.

The creation of a general Government, with its three separate
and measurably independent departments, happily concluded, with
the delegated powers of each disti