the field and patiently wait for two years until a remedy was
discovered, which it voluntarily adopted, without having ever wrung
a tear or a drop of blood from mankind."




_II. The Great Convention_


Now follows a notable and yet little known scene in the drama of
history. It reveals a people who, without shedding a drop of blood,
calmly and deliberately abolished one government, substituted another,
and erected it upon foundations which have hitherto proved enduring.
Even the superstructure slowly erected upon these foundations has
suffered little change in the most changing period of the world's
history, and until recently its additions, few in number, have varied
little from the plans of the original architects. The Constitution is
to-day, not a ruined Parthenon, but rather as one of those Gothic
masterpieces, against which the storms of passionate strife have beaten
in vain. The foundations were laid at a time when disorder was rampant
and anarchy widely prevalent. As I have already shown in my first
lecture, credit was gone, business paralysed, lawlessness triumphant,
and not only between class and class, but between State and State, there
were acute controversies and an alarming disunity of spirit. To weld
thirteen jealous and discordant States, demoralized by an exhausting
war, into a unified and efficient nation against their wills, was a
seemingly impossible task. Frederick the so-called Great had said that a
federal union of widely scattered communities was impossible. Its final
accomplishment has blinded the world to the essential difficulty of the