•  
  •  

Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 5 > Issue 8 (1907)

 

Abstract

That an institution of government, like an institution or practice of society, is a growth and not a creation is now an accepted proposition. No one seeks to argue for it; no one endeavors to deny it. The introduction of this idea into our political thinking strongly influenced our methods and our ideas. In no field of study has the evolutionary idea shown itself more strongly than among workers in history and political science. And yet occasionally one is surprised by seeing how recently this idea has manifested itself in the examination of some historical problems. Until a short time ago, the Constitution of the United States was commonly spoken of as if it was created by some two score men who debated and wrangled in the old state house at Philadelphia during the anxious and trying summer of 1787. Of course it is true that all things are new; and the Federal Constitution was in one sense a new product of the past. But the historian sees its fullest meaning only when he studies the long period during which the fundamental ideas and the master principles of the instrument were being worked out. The idea that the Constitution was not in great measure made at Philadelphia was first successfully attacked only about twenty years ago, when scholars began to show how large a portion of its contents was borrowed from state constitutions, which were themselves the heirs of colonial practices. But this notion that at given moments, at trying crises, inspired geniuses arise to fashion wondrous entities out of preceding nothingness has played in all our affairs a conspicuous role. The American people, who but yesterday were a European people, casting aside the trammels of old world life, and breaking their way into the new atmosphere, of an untried continent, forced to shift for themselves and to adapt themselves to strange conditions, believed actually that they were sufficient in their strength at any moment to create what they needed or desired. This absence of historical perspective was perfectly natural, and there was something inspiring in the enthusiasm and assurance with which problems were solved, or at least valiantly attacked. Possibly this easy self-confidence was quite as useful and much more effective than would have been any serious contemplation, any sober reflection over the forces, the successes and blunders of the past. And yet the readiness to go ahead blindly in answer to the promptings of the moment is not the characteristic of the wisest statesmanship; it is not the nature of the freest state; for the highest freedom must come from right thinking; the best statesmanship must come from self-knowledge-a knowledge of the real state of which the statesman and law-maker is himself a part, a knowledge to 'be gained by a study of the state's growth and not simply from the little space of one's own forgetful experience.

Download

Share

COinS