Excerpt from Conservative Essays: Legal and Political
The largest liberty of the citizen compatible with necessary restraint, or in other words, good government, is the desideratum for whose achievement the wise have incessantly labored since the first formation of human society. This is the great insoluble problem, upon which the wisdom of the whole world has been in vain expended.
At the establishment of ours, there was one form of self-government by the people, on a large scale, that had never been tested by experiment, - that is, a Representative Republic under a written Constitution. This it was determined should be tried. The written Constitution, being the great distinctive feature of the plan, its sanctity and continual supremacy was an obvious necessity to the success of the plan. All depended upon that.
The distribution of power between the Federal and State Governments, with its subdivision between three separate, independent bodies of magistracy, it was hoped and believed, would have great influence in maintaining that supremacy. As to its sanctity, much reliance was placed on its being the nation's great law, voluntarily ordained, which all would be educated to reverence and willing to obey, as their own freewill obligation of allegiance to each other and of joint fealty to their country. There was superadded to this natural fealty, sufficient of itself with enlightened patriots, the obligation of an oath, to be taken by all Federal and State officers, to support the Constitution, thereby teaching them to honor it as the highest, dearest object of American allegiance. Its founders spared no pains in inculcating upon the nation the great importance to our happiness and prosperity of permanently preserving the Constitution in inviolable sanctity.
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