No part of the Constitution was more earnestly and honestly considered than the method of electing the President, and no part of it is now carried out with such an utter disregard of the spirit of and intention of the framers. It was intended that the electors use their discretion in choosing a President; but the people, as they grew more intelligent and divided into political parties, took the business of president-making into their own hands, retaining the electoral college, now a lifeless piece of machinery, only to carry out the letter of the law.

The Constitution of the United States is by far the most important production of its kind in human history. It created, without historic precedent, a federal-national government. It combined national strength with individual liberty in a degree so remarkable as to attract the world�s admiration. Never before in the history of man had a government struck so fine a balance between liberty and union, between state rights and national sovereignty. The world had labored for ages to solve this greatest of all governmental problems, but it had labored in vain. Greece in her mad clamor for liberty had forgotten the need of the strength that union brings, and she perished. Rome made the opposite mistake. Rome fostered union--nationality--for its strength until it became a tyrant, and strangled the child Liberty. It was left for our own Revolutionary fathers to strike the balance between these opposing tendencies, to join them in perpetual wedlock in such a way as to secure the benefits of both. A century of experience, it is true, was needed to adjust this balance as we now have it, but the whole substructure to our national edifice was laid at Philadelphia in 1787.

We find in the Constitution a few features original with the framers, such as the isolated position of the President, the basing of representation on population and many minor details. But on the whole the instrument was a compilation, not an original production. It was the culmination of the institutional growth of two centuries--a tree with trunk and branches purely American, grafted on an English root. The framers of our Constitution were very wise--too wise to draw on their imagination, or to base the government of a nation on theory. No man, or body of men, can create systems of government. They must grow. Had these men attempted to create a chimerical structure, their work would have been valueless. But they displayed great wisdom in selecting the best things that had been tried and proved, and in but few points did they choose unwisely. Hence their great success. Hence the astonishing fact that this same Constitution is still the supreme law of the land, and is more deeply imbedded in the American heart to-day than ever before.

The new instrument differed from the old Articles chiefly in creating three great coordinate departments--legislative, executive, and judicial; in making the citizen rather than the state amenable to national law; and in withholding from the states, and vesting in the national government, powers the exercise of which pertain to the whole people--to coin money, to wage war, to deal with foreign nations, to lay a tariff, and the like. One of the most important clauses in the Constitution is the "supreme law" clause, by virtue of which the Supreme Court came to exercise the power to interpret the Constitution, and to pronounce upon the constitutionality of the acts of the legislative branch of the government, a remarkable power, enjoyed by no other judicial body in the world.

After providing for amending the Constitution, and for its going into operation when nine states should ratify it, the delegates sent it to Congress, then sitting in New York. That body sent it forth to the various states without a word of approval or disapproval.

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