merican people, and to look with exceptional reverence upon
the framers of that instrument. Well, that mind is on the whole quite as
sound as the contemptuous tone taken by Von Holst when he affirms that
"the Constitution had been extorted from the grinding necessity of a
reluctant people."[11] In these words, however, Von Holst himself
scarcely does justice to his own convictions, and they are rather an
extreme form of protest against an extravagant adulation of the
Constitution. Better instruments on paper have been drawn and applied to
conditions of society which were fatal to their efficacy; but the
calling of the convention, the framing of the Constitution, and the
final adoption were possible because in the community at large the ideas
of freedom and of self-government had already been formulated in local
institutions for generations, and for generations had been moulding the
character of the popular thought. The towns, the parishes, the boroughs,
of the early colonies were the inheritors of communal ideas which had
filtered from Germanic free communities through English parishes; under
the favoring conditions of a new world and its unchecked enterprise they
had become political units of great integrity. The colonies, with their
local government, modified rather than controlled by royal or
proprietary influence, had already learned many lessons of autonomy: the
period of the war had confirmed these several powers, and the conclusion
of the war found them still in possession of their interior organic
life, and lacking only that sovereignty which they had resisted and
overthrown. But the state life was incomplete: there was an absence of a
solid sovereignty in which the States could rest, and the political
thought of the independent colonies required for its final fulfillment
the depositary of national consciousness which the King and Parliament
had been, but could no longer be. It was the working out of this
practical political thought which issued in the Constitution and central
government, and it was possible to be worked out only because there had
been generations of Americans trained in political life.

Webster was one of these men. He was the product of the forces which had
been at work in the country from the earliest days. English freedom,
which had forced its ways to these shores, had grown and increased under
the fostering care of self-government and native industry. He had been
born and brought up in a New