From the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the French
Revolution the masses everywhere were influenced by the emotional, and
at times hysterical, abstractions of the French encyclopedists; and that
these had influenced thought in the American colonies is readily shown
in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its
unqualified assertion of the equality of men and the absolute right of
self-determination. The Declaration sought in its noble idealism to make
the "world safe for democracy," but the Constitution attempted the
greater task of making democracy safe for the world by inducing a people
to impose upon themselves salutary restraints upon majority rule.

Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution had learned a rude and
terrible lesson in the anarchy that had followed the War of
Independence. They were not so much concerned about the rights of man as
about his duties, and their great purpose was to substitute for the
visionary idealism of a rampant individualism the authority of law. Of
the hysteria of that time, which was about to culminate in the French
Revolution, there is no trace in the Constitution.

They were less concerned about Rousseau's social contract than to
restore law and order. Hard realities and not generous and impossible
abstractions interested them. They had suffered grievously for more than
ten years from misrule and had a distaste for mere phrase-making, of
which they had had a satiety, for the Constitution, in which there is
not a wasted word, is as cold and dry a document as a problem in
mathematics or a manual of parliamentary law. Its mandates have the
simplicity and directness of the Ten Commandments, and, like the
Decalogue, it consists more of what shall not be done than what shall be
done. In this freedom from empiricism and sturdy adherence to the