The importance of this feature of civil
government in the United States can hardly be overrated. It marks a
momentous advance in civilization, and it is especially interesting as
being peculiarly American. Almost everything else in our fundamental
institutions was brought by our forefathers in a more or less highly
developed condition from England; but the development of the written
constitution, with the consequent relation of the courts to the
law-making power, has gone on entirely upon American soil.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]
[Sidenote: Germs of the idea of a written constitution.]
[Sidenote: Our indebtedness to the Romans.]
[Sidenote: Mediaeval charters.]
The germs of the written constitution existed a great while ago.
Perhaps it would not be easy to say just when they began to exist.
It was formerly supposed by such profound thinkers as Locke and such
persuasive writers as Rousseau, that when the first men came together
to live in civil society, they made a sort of contract with one
another as to what laws they would have, what beliefs they would
entertain, what customs they would sanction, and so forth. This
theory of the Social Contract was once famous, and exerted a notable
influence on political history, and it is still interesting in the
same way that spinning-wheels and wooden frigates and powdered wigs
are interesting; but we now know that men lived in civil society,
with complicated laws and customs and creeds, for many thousand years
before the notion had ever entered anybody's head that things could
be regulated by contract.
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