But American experience, let it be remembered, was not limited to the colonies and States. There had been contact all along with the English Constitution itself as the supreme constitution of the united British empire. And the Englishmen of the colonies had sympathized with and been profoundly affected by its vicissitudes. The fall of Charles I., the accession of Cromwell, the restoration of Charles II., the arbitrary reign of James II., the Revolution of 1688, and the coming in of the House of Hanover, were constitutional events, felt by them quite as really as, if less directly than, by their brethren at home, events which left permanent results upon even their local institutions. The Constitution of the mother-land had been more than an ideal model; it had been a vital factor in the life of the American people. And there was a controlling force in the fact that until 1776 they had thus continued in unbroken touch with the ancient political fabric, in addition to having lived under an adaptation of it in their several provinces. The delegates at the Philadelphia Convention, in taking the State constitutions as a model for the new Constitution of the United States, took also the English Constitution itself, considered not merely as a theory or an ideal, but as a contemporaneous fact, and as an essential element in American political experience. Yet the elements of the English Constitution which were thus adopted into the Constitution of the United at once federal and republican."— Taylor, Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, 68. States differ in many respects from those existing in the England of to-day. "The comparison is the more difficult," lucidly remarks an American law professor, "because the English Constitution is not a constant quantity. Like the glacier, which, though seeming fixed and rigid, is yet plastic and suffers a continual change, it has varied in each century, and sometimes in each successive generation." And Sir Henry Maine touches the same point: "The Constitution of the United States is coloured throughout by political ideas of British origin, and it is in reality a version of the British Constitution as it must have presented itself to an observer in the second half of the last century." And again: "The Constitution of the United States is a modified version of the British Constitution, but the British Constitution which served as its original was that which was in existence between 1760 and 1787. The modifications introduced were those, and those only, which were suggested by the new circumstances of the American colonies, now become independent." It is certainly strange that, until very recently, no general realization of this historical truth of the derivation of the American Constitution from English originals has appeared to exist either in the mother or the daughter land. Facts bearing on the subject 1 J. I. Clark Hare, Notes of a Course of Lectures on American Constitutional Law, Philadelphia, 1885, p. 86. have been familiar to most English-speaking persons. But from the first a singular silence has prevailed on the whole question of sources, - a silence which is so noteworthy for the period of the adoption and ratification of the new Constitution by the States, as to seem to require explanation. Whatever may be said of later times, how was it possible that so little was spoken or published regarding English sources at the eventful epoch when the question of the new central government profoundly agitated the people? How can the comparative ignoring of the matter by all parties during the very season when turbulent debate was conducted upon the merits and demerits of the freshly constructed document, be accounted for? Sir Henry Maine refers to this remarkable silence, especially as affecting the pages of the Federalist, and ventures an explanation. "There is one fountain of political experience upon which the Federalist seldom draws, and that is the political experience of Great Britain. The scantiness of these references is at first sight inexplicable. The writers must have understood Great Britain better than any other country except their own. They had been British subjects during most of their lives. They had scarcely yet ceased to breathe the atmosphere of the British Parliament, and to draw strength from its characteristic disturbances. . . . On the whole it cannot but be suspected that the fewness of the appeals to British historical examples had its cause in their unpopularity. The object of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay was to persuade their countrymen ; and the appeal to British experience would only have provoked prejudice and repulsion."1 The reaction of popular sentiment, which turned the old love of England into a new feeling of hostility, certainly goes far to account for this contemporaneous silence. It is true that the Americans had but recently emerged from British rule, but that rule had been put aside in consequence of a hard-fought war, and the passions of war were still too fresh to permit the use of arguments based upon British experience in favour of any document commended for adoption by the people. Yet the noted author just quoted but partly indicates the reason for the phenomenon in question. He appears to be thinking of the public utterances of the leaders, and to have in mind only the English Constitution of that period. And a distinction is important to remember, -that the American Constitution, though reflecting a contemporaneous stage, was not a mere imitation of the Constitution of the mother-land, but an historical development from it. Its similarity to its prototype resulted not from any copying process first undertaken in the Convention at Philadelphia. Rather was it a reaffirmation of principles already American by hereditary usage or long-established custom. The earliest attempt at a national constitution, that of the Confederation, had been a failure precisely as to the points in which it departed from these principles; and the present Constitution was 1 Popular Government, 206, 207. a return to a system from which the colonies themselves had never departed.1 Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and others had no need to argue for the adoption of English constitutional usage as such, to a people who were already accustomed to it as their own. Little was said, for little needed to be said. The people thought and acted from long-acquired habit. Even the members of the Convention, though consciously taking much from the old system, were doubtless incompletely aware of the extent to which they themselves were influenced by their training under such institutions.2 The establishment of a 1 "No unbiassed student of political history is disposed to ignore the great merits which are attributed to the English Constitution, due to the fact that it is the result of growth and not of manufacture. The history of fiat-constitutions illustrates the pitiful failures of organic law made to order; and the unhappy experiences of the many South American republics whose constitutions have been patterned after that of the United States, show that a successful form of government cannot be introduced into a country by mere importation, especially if it find no support in the political habits and character of the people." — Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, April, 1891, p. 529. 2 "An assembly could hardly have been convened in the United Kingdom more English as to race and political training than that made up of the fifty-three delegates who composed the Federal Convention. The Virginia delegation was simply a brilliant group of English country gentlemen who had been reared on the right side of the Atlantic. Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris were born English subjects; the father of Franklin was an English emigrant from Northamptonshire; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had been educated at Oxford and the Middle Temple; Rutledge had studied law at the Temple; and James Wilson, the most far-sighted man perhaps in the whole Convention, was born near St. Andrew's, |