than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not
seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be
ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of
ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of
time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and
experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of
tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability.
They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race,
and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed.
The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic affirmations or
fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn.
This was a practical question, and they addressed themselves to it as men
of knowledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English
principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and
they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as
they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their
whim. With few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of the then
accepted syllogism,--democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was
framed upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their
narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable
fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion was reverberated from
house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till every
impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular
assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a
mob, all the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of
law.[2]

Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for
a widely scattered population and for States already practised in the
discipline of a partial independence. They had an unequalled opportunity
and enormous advantages. The material they had to work upon was already
democratical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by
more than a century's schooling in self-government. They had but to give
permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and
direction to their new institutions, especially in supplying them with
checks and balances, they had a great help and safeguard in their federal
organization. The di