er constitutions of the Southern and Western States. Another thing
Blackstone oddly says, is that in legislation by the people they will
show great caution in making new laws that may interfere with their
rights and liberties. Precisely the contrary is experienced. Nobody is
so willing to interfere with the rights or liberties of the people
as the people themselves, or their supposed representatives in the
legislature; and a body or faction of the people is far more ready and
reckless to impose its will upon the others than have been the most
masterful English monarchs.

The recklessness of legislatures has two or three most evil
consequences. They pass foolish or unconstitutional laws, relying on
the governor to veto them, or the courts to declare them void--which
has the effect of shirking their responsibility and imposing unjust
and obnoxious duties on the other branches of government, to which
they do not fairly belong; increases the growing disrespect for
all law, and deteriorates the moral and intellectual fibre of the
legislature itself. Finally, also, it provokes that hypertrophic
modern State constitution of the South and West, which tries to bind
down future legislatures in infinite particulars, thereby again
diminishing their importance and responsibility, making it more
difficult to get able men to serve in them, and, by the frequent
necessary amendment of State constitutions, resulting in a continual
referendum, which nearly does away with representative government
itself.

Moreover, when a law is unconstitutional it should ever be only
because it violates some great natural right of humanity, personal
liberty, property, or the right to common law. When constitutions go
into details which are not substantially connected with these cardinal
rights, they bring themselves into contempt, and justify the growing
prejudice of our labor leaders against them. The people should
believe, as I think they do believe under the Federal Constitution and
under the older ones of the States, that when a law is declared _no_
law by a high court for being counter to the higher will of the
people as expressed in their permanent constitution, it is not on a
technicality, but because some great liberty right is infringed by it.
Yet it is a curious thing that whereas our people only got the power
to legislate by democratic assemblies freely and completely from the
year 1776, in hardly more than a hundred years after their consci