a. The Convention, therefore,
lacked the valuable combination of lucid thought on the philosophy of
politics and a keen appreciation of the direction of the popular will
which he above all men could have supplied.

The task before the Convention was a hard and perilous one, and nothing
about it was more hard and perilous than its definition. What were they
there to do? Were they framing a treaty between independent
Sovereignties, which, in spite of the treaty, would retain their
independence, or were they building a nation by merging these
Sovereignties in one general Sovereignty of the American people? They
began by proceeding on the first assumption, re-modelling the
Continental Congress--avowedly a mere alliance--and adding only such
powers as it was plainly essential to add. They soon found that such a
plan would not meet the difficulties of the hour. But they dared not
openly adopt the alternative theory: the States would not have borne it.
Had it, for example, been specifically laid down that a State once
entering the Union might never after withdraw from it, quite half the
States would have refused to enter it. To that extent the position
afterwards taken up by the Southern Secessionists was historically
sound. But there was a complementary historical truth on the other side.
There can be little doubt that in this matter the founders of the
Republic desired and intended more than they ventured to attempt. The
fact that men of unquestionable honesty and intelligence were in after
years so sharply and sincerely divided as to what the Constitution
really _was_, was in truth the result of a divided mind in those who
framed the Constitution. They made an alliance and hoped it would grow
into a nation. The preamble of the Constitution represents the
aspirations of the American Fathers; the clauses represent the furthest
they dared towards those aspirations. The preamble was therefore always
the rallying point of those who wished to see America one nation. Its
operative clause ran: "We, the People of the United States, in order to
form a more perfect Union, ... do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America." That such language was a strong point
in favour of the Federalist interpreters of the Constitution was
afterwards implicitly admitted by the extreme exponents of State
Sovereignty themselves, for when they came to frame for their own
Confederacy a Constitution reflecting their own views