The Constitution Of The United States Its Friends And Foes PDF Download

Excerpt from The Constitution of the United States Its Friends and Foes: Address Somebody, has said: Doubtless God might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless God never did. So the seasoned judgment of mankind is: Doubtless man might have made a better constitution than ours, but doubtless man never did. Gladstone said of it: The Constitution of the United States is the greatest political instrument ever struck off on a single occasion by the minds of men. Of it De Tocqueville declared: It enables the Union to combine the power of a great empire with the security of a small State. Impressed with its priceless excellence, Caleb Gushing characterized it as - The best inheritance transmitted to us by our fathers, the monument of their wisdom and their virtue under whose shelter we live and flourish as a people. Encomiums might be multiplied, but the foregoing epitomizes the verdict of impartial minds in all lands. Under the mantle of its protection our Republic for a century and a quarter has survived the shock of foreign and internal wars, as well as the exactions of peace, and despite detraction and opposition and "false lights on the shore," our Government of the people, by the people, and for the people still stands upon the foundations of the fathers. How secure it is still rests with the American people. Of late a change seems to have come over a goodly portion of our citizenship - a portentous change - and instead of reverence for the Constitution and pride in its provisions, the air is full of missiles armed at this great instrument. A variable epidemic of Constitution criticizing, Constitution changing, and. I sometimes fear, Constitution wrecking has broken out everywhere. To assail the organic law and condemn its provisions as outgrown and inadequate for present purposes, seems to be both the fashion and the passion of the hour. The citizen who has not yielded to this malady is branded as a reactionary or worse. Samuel Smiles says: It takes a strong man to swim against the stream; any dead fish can float with it. To such lengths has caustic criticism of the Constitution been carried that it is a popular pastime to blame the National Charter for nearly every form of misfortune that vexes the citizen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.