doubt that Webster's impressive idealization of the
Constitution gave a certain narrowness to American thinking on
constitutional government and the science of politics and legislation.
Foreigners, of the most liberal views, could not sometimes restrain an
expression of wonder, when they found that our most intelligent men,
even our jurists and publicists, hardly condescended to notice the
eminent European thinkers on the philosophy of government, so absorbed
were they in the contemplation of the perfection of their own. When the
great civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of American citizens
marched to the battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing
in their hearts. They met death cheerfully in the cause of the
"Constitution and Union," as by him expounded and idealized; and if they
were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they
still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of
Webster's speeches which they had declaimed as boys in their country
schools. Of all the triumphs of Webster as a leader of public opinion,
the most remarkable was his infusing into the minds of the people of the
free States the belief that the Constitution as it existed in his time
was an organic fact, springing from the intelligence, hearts, and wills
of the people of the United States, and not, as it really was, an
ingenious mechanical contrivance of wise men, to which the people, at
the time, gave their assent.

The constitutions of the separate States of the Union were doubtless
rooted in the habits, sentiments, and ideas of their inhabitants. But
the Constitution of the United States could not possess this advantage,
however felicitously it may have been framed for the purpose of keeping,
for a considerable period, peace between the different sections of the
country. As long, therefore, as the institution of negro slavery lasted,
it could not be called a Constitution of States organically "United";
for it lacked the principle of _growth_, which characterizes all
constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive
needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which
stimulates them to advance. The unwritten constitution of Great Britain
has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole
representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws
which the Parliament had enacted in former years. In Great Britain,
therefo