e of the several States. How this
mandate was disregarded and how the convention was formed, and
proceeded to create a new government with a new Constitution, and how
it achieved its mighty work, will be the subject of the next lecture.

Anticipating the masterly ability with which a seemingly impotent and
dying nation plucked from the nettle of danger the flower of safety, let
me conclude this first address by quoting the words of de Tocqueville,
in his remarkable work _Democracy in America_, where he says:

"The Federal Government, condemned to impotence by its Constitution
and no longer sustained by the presence of common danger ... was
already on the verge of destruction when it officially proclaimed
its inability to conduct the government and appealed to the
constituent authority of the nation.... It is a novelty in the
history of a society to see a calm and scrutinizing eye turned upon
itself, when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of
government are stopped; to see it carefully examine the extent of
the field and patiently wait for two years until a remedy was
discovered, which it voluntarily adopted, without having ever wrung
a tear or a drop of blood from mankind."

_II. The Great Convention_

Now follows a notable and yet little known scene in the drama of
history. It reveals a people who, without shedding a drop of blood,
calmly and deliberately abolished one government, substituted another,
and erected it upon foundations which have hitherto proved enduring.
Even the superstructure slowly erected upon these foundations has
suffered little change in the most changing period of the world's
history, and until recently its additions, few in number, have varied
little from the plans of the original architects. The Constitution is
to-day, not a ruined Parthenon, but rather as one of those Gothic
masterpieces, against which the storms of passionate strife have beaten
in vain. The foundations were laid at a time when disorder was rampant
and anarchy widely prevalent. As I have already shown in my first
lecture, credit was gone, business paralysed, lawlessness triumphant,
and not only between class and class, but between State and State, there
were acute controversies and an alarming disunity of spirit. To weld
thirteen jealous and discordant States, demoralized by an exhausting
war, into a unified and efficient nation against their wills, was a
seeming