FOURTEEN SUBSTITUTES FOR THE CONSTITUTION GROUPED.

1. A Pious Fraud. 2. "We, the People." 3. A Divided Sovereignty. 4. "The Union Much Older than the Constitution." 5. A Higher Law. 6. An Unwritten Constitution. 7. A Common Law. 8. The Federal Government an Organic Growth. 9. The Silence of the Constitution. 10. The Wrong of Slavery. 11. A Party Platform. 12. Indifference of Foreign Immigrants. 13. Nationalization. 14. Fate.

A Few Admitted Facts.

If such writers as Charles Francis Adams, Francis Newton Thorpe, and J. P. Gordy, in their efforts to place the tremendous responsibilities of the Great War on the South, can produce no sustaining facts there are no such facts. We lay down as an indisputable proposition that facts which ignore the Constitution are not admissable. If there is one central fact in the history of our country around which all other facts should circle, that one fact is the Federal Constitution. By its adoption, all the States pledged their sacred honor to abide its terms. It was the "Balm of Gilead" for all their wounds. To reject it was to invite political disease and death. It was rejected in the Sixties by the North; and the world knows the result.

Now that the war is a thing of the past its defenders find themselves embarrassed from a Constitutional standpoint. So much was said; so much was done; so much sorrow and suffering and death and ruin was brought to the country-all in the name of the Constitution-that it is now more than human nature can do to confess the wrong. Therefore from sheer necessity they have invented substitutes for the constitution. These substitutes abound. They are are too numerous for all to receive proper attention here. We shall therefore confine ourselves to only fourteen. Were it not for the very serious results that followed the violation of the Constitution by the North in the Six

ties these substitutes would be laughable. To future generations they will be the subjects of ridicule, yea of scorn; for what substitutes for the Constitution, the embodiment, of the plighted faith of the States, could justify all the horrors of the Sixties? We have perhaps mentioned already the most, if not all of the substitutes, we are now about to consider. However that may be, we now propose to group them that the world may behold the motley group.

1. The first substitute we shall mention is "A Pious Fraud." Fraud is its name. Even its piety cannot change either its name or its character. Its claim to support the Constitution is unsustained by fact, fitness, or reason. J. P. Gordy, for the want of sustaining facts, has asserted that, "the Convention framed a Constitution by the adoption of which thirteen peoples, imagining themselves still independent and sovereign, really acknowledged themselves to be parts of a single political whole." (Political Parties in the United States.) Mr. Gordy thus declares that the States were Independent and Sovereign before they adopted the Constitution, a fact he could not deny. But his concluding clause is without even the semblance of fact, resting on his bare assertion. Charles Francis Adams, referring to these words of Gordy, and basing his statement on them, declared that "A Pious Fraud was, in 1788, perpetrated on the average American" that is, the States were robbed of their independence and sovereignty without their knowing it. What a bold assertion! How reckless, how unfounded! What a stretch of the imagination! What limitation can be fixed for inventive genius under the strain of necessity! Do not Mr. Gordy and Mr. Adams know that stolen goods still belong to the rightful owner? Do they not, therefore, also know that even if such an absurdity could have been fact the States would still have maintained their Independence and Sovereignty? But whether there was fraud or no fraud, one thing is assured beyond contradiction, viz: That the intention of the framers of the Constitution was to preserve the Independence and Sovereignty of the States. And who does not know the supreme importance of the intention of the law makers in determining the true construction of the law? But,

aside from it all, who believes that the Philadelphia Convention was capable of deliberately planning and committing a fraud, whether pious or impious? Never assembled for nobler purpose nobler specimens of true and virtuous manhood. Very bold indeed is the man who would make such a charge! Who believes that, but for sheer necessity, such a fraud would have ever been invented, yea, would ever have been conceived in the brain of man? There was no such fraud.

2. A second Substitute is "We, the People" in the preamble of the Constitution. It is conceded that all preamples find their explanation in the body of the instrument. No people, no State, is a truism. And what is a State but "the whole body of a people united under one Government?" What the State therefore does the people of the State do. What the States united do the people of the States united do. That is all "We the people of the United States" in the preamble to the Constitution declares or means. Do your utmost. You cannot make anything else out of it. It is probable, however, that the term might have been so expressed as to have rendered it more difficult for designing politicians to twist its meaning to suit their own sinister designs. Let us experiment. If the preamble had said, "We the People of the respective States United," would it have had a different meaning from "We the People of the United States"? If it had read "We the States United," would it not have meant the same since a State is the whole body of people united under one government? What then, but an inevitable necessity could find the Consolidation of the States in the term, "We the People of the United States"?

Let us look a little further. Were they not States, or, as Webster and Madison and others termed them, nations united for a common purpose, having a common interest? The very face of the instrument shows they did not part with all their powers, but only with such as they specified in the instrument. Did they not continue to exist still as the same States and under the same names? As the same States, known by the same names as before the Union, did they not exercise all the powers they had not ceded? Did they not inaugurate the Federal Government

itself? Did that Federal Givernment have the right to exercise a single power these States had not granted it? Could the Government ever have gone into operation without the consent of these States in their political capacity?

Besides, was not the Constitution a Compact among the States? Is not this one point in which all authorities are agreed? Will it be argued that it is a compact with the Government and not a compact of each State with the others? Can it be denied that a Government founded on compact to which each State was a party, was a Federal Government? If it was not a Government formed by a league of the States how shall we account for the fact that the States adopted the Constitution at different times and on different conditions? Have we not shown in a previous chapter that New York, Virginia and Rhode Island entered the Union on conditions proposed by themselves? Did not the last named State refuse to enter the Confederacy for more than a year after the inauguration of Washington?

"We the People" means nothing more than that "the people of the several States had been consulted and had given their consent to the instrument." Did not Washington style the Federal Government a "Confederated Government"? And what does that mean but States or Nations united in a league, or allied by treaty, or united in a Confederacy? In a pamphlet edition of Webster's speech at Capon Springs in Virginia on the 28th day of June, 1851, Webster affirmed that "the Union was a Union of States," and that it was "founded upon compact." He then added: "How is it to be supposed that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes, either can disregard any one provision and expect, nevertheless, the others to observe the rest?"-that is "a compact broken on one side could not continue to bind the other." These are Webster's own words. A Compact among the States and a Confederacy of the States means the same. Did not all New England during Madison's Administration declare the Government a Confederacy, subject to dissolution! And what is a Confederacy but a league, a covenant, or contract? When applied to States it is nothing less than a league or covenant, or contract among States. This is as far

from a consolidation of States as the East is from the West. If we turn to the Philadelphia Convention we find that twentysix times the term "National Government" was stricken from the Randolph resolutions and twenty-six times the term "United States" was substituted in their stead. If we turn to the States ratifying the Constitution we find them unanimous and emphatic in declaring that this Republic of States is one with limited powers having only granted powers-and that the States are free, independent and sovereign over their reserved rights. If we turn to the Constitution itself we find that all the powers not granted to the Federal Government "are reserved to the States or the people." If we are still in doubt the closing words of that instrument remove all doubt, thus: "Done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the States present." "The States or the people" then mean the States; and the States means the people of the States. What now is the meaning of "We, the People of the United States" in the preamblie of the Constitution? Necessity must seek another substitute. And here it is:

3. "A Divided Sovereignty." Comparatively speaking there are only a few who distinguish between the term "Divided Sovereignty" and "the Divided Powers of Sovereignty." Even Judge Iredell, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, treated the two terms as synonymous. This fact gave the necessitied defenders of the justice of the war against the South a new substitute; one that could be made to seem plausible, by quoting a Judge of the Supreme Court, and all who use this argument quote Judge Iredell, omitting the fact that the Judge made the two terms identical. There is, there can be, no such a thing as "a Divided Sovereignty." Therefore it can not form a basis for an argument. There is such a thing as the divided Powers of Sovereignty. This the States in the Convention realized. "The powers delegated" are words of the Constitution. "The powers reserved to the States are also words of the Constitution. If we look to the Constitution, we do not find in it any such term as "a Divided Sovereignty"not even the remotest reference to it. But we do find, from its preamble to its finish, beneath the surface, the consent of