James Beck

In a word, the Confederation appears to me to be little more than a shadow without the substance, and Congress a nugatory body, their ordinances being little attended to....

Illiberality, jealousy, and local policy mix too much in all our public councils for good government of the union.

The war, as you have very justly observed, has terminated most advantageously for America, and a fair field is presented to our view; but I confess to you freely, my dear sir, that I do not think we possess wisdom or justice enough to…

In the absence of any government and in the period of general prostration it was not unnatural that the spirit of Bolshevism grew with alarming rapidity.

The currency of the United States had fallen almost as low as the Austrian kronen, and men derisively plastered the walls of their houses with the worthless paper of the Continental Congress.

What a constancy, what a magnanimity, what a surprising persistence against fortune!...

Two circumstances saved them from the consequences of such incapacity: one was the invaluable aid of France, and the other the personality of George Washington.

Moreover, the Congress could not levy any taxes, or indeed pass any measure unless nine out of the thirteen States agreed, and the Constitution could not be amended except by unanimous vote.

The founders of the Republic were not fools, and while they did not, as Gladstone seems to intimate, have the inspired wisdom to develop a wonderful Constitution by sheer intuition unaided by experience, they did have the ability to make…

The founders of the Republic could only learn from their errors, but it is their great merit that they had the ability to profit in the stern school of experience, of which Franklin has said that it is a "dear school, but fools will learn…

As the result proved, they marked only a very small advance over the existing de facto government, for the constituent States were still too jealous of each other and too hostile to the creation of a central government to form a truly…

Washington's little army was the victim of the gross incapacity of an impotent government.

For want of an efficient central government, the civil administration of the infant nation was marked by a weakness and incapacity that defeated Washington's plans and nearly broke his spirit.

This assumes that the Constitution sprang, like Minerva, armed cap-à-pie, from the brain of the American people, whereas it was as much the result of a slow, laborious, and painful evolution as was the British Constitution.

As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

Should an Act of Parliament be against any of His natural laws, which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to eternal truth, equity and justice, and consequently void; and so it would be adjudged by the Parliament…

Parliaments are in all cases to declare what is for the good of the whole; but it is not the declaration of parliament that makes it so: there must be in every instance a higher authority, viz., GOD.

To say the parliament is absolute and arbitrary is a contradiction.

The differences between the colonies and the mother-country with respect to internal taxation slowly developed into an issue of constitutionalism rather than of legislative policy.

Obviously, a working government could not easily be constituted between peoples of different religions, races, and economic interests, who, for the most part, never met each other face to face and with whom frequent communication was…

The Constitution was the reflex action of two opposing tendencies, the one the imperative need of an efficient central government, and the other the passionate attachment to local self-rule.

Thus arose the spirit in America, which treated constitutional rights, not so much as special privileges granted by plenary Sovereignty, but as contractual obligations which could be enforced in the Courts against the Sovereign.

Bacon, Sandys, Southampton and the Liberal leaders of the House of Commons had implanted in the ideas of the colonists the spirit of constitutionalism, which was destined to influence profoundly the whole development of the American…

Thus was established, not only the beginning of England's colonial Empire--still one of the most beneficent forces in the world--but also the principle of local self-government, which, in the Western World, was destined to develop the…

Truly the mustard seed of Virginia did become a great tree in the American Commonwealth.