prejudice. Their error sinks into insignificance compared with the
enormous service which they rendered to the American people and the
American cause. Without their help there might not have been any
American nation at all, or it might have been born under a far darker
cloud of political suspicion and animosity. The instrument which they
created, with all its faults, proved capable of becoming both the organ
of an efficient national government and the fundamental law of a
potentially democratic state. It has proved capable of flexible
development both in function and in purpose, and it has been developed
in both these directions without any sacrifice of integrity.

Its success has been due to the fact that its makers, with all their
apprehensions about democracy, were possessed of a wise and positive
political faith. They believed in liberty. They believed that the
essential condition of fruitful liberty was an efficient central
government. They knew that no government could be efficient unless its
powers equaled its responsibilities. They were willing to trust to such
a government the security and the welfare of the American people. The
Constitution has proved capable of development chiefly as the instrument
of these positive political ideas. Thanks to the theory of implied
powers, to the liberal construction of the Supreme Court during the
first forty years of its existence, and to the results of the Civil War
the Federal government has, on the whole, become more rather than less
efficient as the national political organ of the American people. Almost
from the start American life has grown more and more national in
substance, in such wise that a rigid constitution which could not have
been developed in a national direction would have been an increasing
source of irritation and protest. But this reënforcement of the
substance of American national life has, until recently, found an
adequate expression in the increasing scope and efficiency of the