time, who could be happy if they were prosperous, and would never
risk prosperity and peace in the pursuit of freedom.

Those who imagined that France possessed a submerged Constitution that
might be extracted from her annals had a difficult task. Lanjuinais
desired to sail by a beacon and to direct the politics of 1789 by a
charter of 864. There was a special reason, less grotesque than the
archaeology of Lanjuinais, which made men averse to the Declaration.
Liberty, it was said, consists in the reign of the national will, and
the national will is known by national custom. Law ought to spring
from custom, and to be governed by it, not by independent, individual
theory that defies custom. You have to declare the law, not to make
it, and you can only declare what experience gives you. The best
government devised by reason is less free than a worse government
bequeathed by time. Very dimly, ideas which rose to power in other
days and evolved the great force of nationality, were at work against
a system which was to be new and universal, renouncing the influence
both of time and place. The battle was fought against the men of the
past, against a history which was an unbroken record of the defeat
and frustration of freedom. But the declaration of rights was more
needful still against dangers on the opposite side, those that were
coming more than those that were going out. People were quite resolved
to be oppressed no more by monarchy or aristocracy, but they had no
experience or warning of oppression by democracy. The classes were to
be harmless; but there was the new enemy, the State.

No European knew what security could be needed or provided for the
individual from the collected will of the people. They were protected
from government by authority or by minority; but they made the
majority irresistible, and the _plebiscite_ a tyranny.

The Americans were aware that democracy might be weak and
unintelligent, but also that it might be despotic and oppressive. And
they found out the way to limit it, by the federal system, which
suffers it to exist nowhere in its plenitude. They deprived their
state governments of the powers that were enumerated, and the central
government of the powers that were reserved. As the Romans knew how
monarchy would become innocuous, by being divided, the Americans
solved the more artful problem of dividing democracy into two.

Many Frenchmen were convinced that Federalism would be the really