a Constitution under which, we have managed to
live, comparatively prosperous, for a century. Had it been otherwise,
our Constitution would have gone to pieces in the first twenty-five
years of its existence. A constitution is a legal recognition of
certain general rules of conduct that are ever the same under all
circumstances. Legislation is the adaptation of those rules to
individual cases; and as these vary and change with continuously
new conditions, a fixed application in a constitution is impossible.
For this restriction, as far as it goes, we have to thank the States
and not the sagacity of the fathers.

The Constitution was scarcely enacted before the communism of a
paternal form began to manifest itself. The Federal party was of this
sort. It sneered at and fought the sovereignty of the people, and
found its governing element in a class that was supposed to hold
in itself the intelligence and virtue of the people. It has
departed and been done to death, not by the people, who failed to
comprehend or feel the situation, but by the same cause that
created the Constitution,--and that was the jealous opposition of
the States to a centralization of power at Washington.

After the death of the Federal party the Whig organization was formed,
on the same line and for the same purpose as those of its Federal
predecessor. Henry Clay, its author, an eloquent but ignorant man,
formulated his American system, that was a small affair in the
beginning, but had deadly seeds of evil in its composition. Mr. Clay
saw the necessity for manufactures in the United States; and as
capital necessary to their existence in private hands could not be
obtained, he proposed that the government should intervene through a
misuse of the taxing power and supply the want. It was a modest want
at first. "Let us aid these infant industries," he said, "until they
are strong enough to stand alone, and then the government may withdraw
and leave competition to regulate prices." It was a plausible but
insidious proposition.

This was fought bitterly by the South, not altogether from a high
ground of principle, although the argument was made that the
government at Washington had no such power under the Constitution, but
the main motive was self-interest. The South was an agricultural
region, and found in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco staples that had
their better, indeed their only, market in Europe, and saw no sense in
trammelling it with laws