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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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…

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

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....

By such policy as this the wheels of government are clogged, and our brightest prospects, and that high expectation which was entertained of us by the wondering world, are turned into astonishment; and, from the high ground on which we…

I have seen without despondency, even for a moment, the hours which America has styled its gloomy ones, but I have beheld no day since the commencement of hostilities that I thought our liberties in such imminent danger as at present.

Indeed, we are verging so fast to destruction that I am feeling that sense to which I have been a stranger until within these three months.

From the high ground we stood upon, from the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen, so lost, is mortifying; but everything of virtue has, in a degree, taken its departure from our land....

What, gracious God, is man that there should be such inconsistency, and perfidiousness in his conduct!

It was but the other day that we were shedding our blood to obtain the Constitutions under which we now live, and now we are unsheathing our swords to overturn them.

The thing is so unaccountable that I hardly know how to realize it or to persuade myself that I am not under an illusion of a dream.

It reveals a people who, without shedding a drop of blood, calmly and deliberately abolished one government, substituted another, and erected it upon foundations which have hitherto proved enduring.

The Constitution is to-day, not a ruined Parthenon, but rather as one of those Gothic masterpieces, against which the storms of passionate strife have beaten in vain.

As I have already shown in my first lecture, credit was gone, business paralysed, lawlessness triumphant, and not only between class and class, but between State and State, there were acute controversies and an alarming disunity of spirit.

To weld thirteen jealous and discordant States, demoralized by an exhausting war, into a unified and efficient nation against their wills, was a seemingly impossible task.

They represented the spirit of representative government at its best in avoiding the cowardice of time-servers and the low cunning of demagogues.

Leagues of States had often existed, but a league which, within a prescribed sphere, would have direct authority over the citizens of the constituent States, without, however, abolishing the authority of such States as to their reserved…

Washington, however, had warmly welcomed the creation of a strong central government, and his correspondence with the leading men of the colonies for some years previously had been burdened with arguments to convince them that a mere…

To George Washington, soldier and statesman, is due above all men the ideal of a federated union, for without his influence--that of a noble and unselfish leader--the great result would probably never have been secured.

The consequence is that again and again we are running the risk of perpetrating the most grotesque errors of judgment, of committing the most serious political blunders, in defiance of American public opinion.