upon an untried experiment, and after debating for four months upon the
principles of government, were content to embody their conclusions in
not more than four thousand words. To this we owe the elasticity of the
instrument. Its vitality is due to the fact that, by usage, judicial
interpretation, and, when necessary, formal amendment, it can be thus
adapted to the ever-accelerating changes of the most progressive age in
history, and that a people have administered the Constitution who, in
the process of such adaptation, have generally shown the same spirit of
conservative self-restraint as did the men who framed it.

The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which
wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it,
on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the
erosion of the waves. It is rather to be likened to a floating dock,
which, while firmly attached to its moorings, and not therefore the
caprice of the waves, yet rises and falls with the tide of time and
circumstance.

While in its practical adaptation to this complex age the men who framed
it, if they could "revisit the glimpses of the moon," would as little
recognize their own handiwork as their own nation, yet they would still
be able to find in successful operation the essential principles which
they embodied in the document more than a century ago.

Its success is also due to the fact that its framers were little
influenced by the spirit of doctrinarianism. They were not empiricists,
but very practical men. This is the more remarkable because they worked
in a period of an emotional fermentation of human thought. The
long-repressed intellect of man had broken into a violent eruption like
that of a seemingly extinct volcano.