This conception of individualism, enforced in courts of law against executives and legislatures, was wholly new and is the distinguishing characteristic of American constitutionalism.
James Beck
The Public Record
James Montgomery Beck was an American lawyer, politician, and author from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Republican Party, who served as U.S. Solicitor General and U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania.
gutenberg.org
Our fathers did not believe in the sovereignty of the State in the sense of absolute power, nor did they believe in the sovereignty of the people in that sense.
It is not too much to say that the success with which the framers of the Constitution reconciled national supremacy and efficiency with local self-government is one of the great achievements in the history of mankind.
Originally, the States were the powerful political entities, and the central government a mere agent for certain specific purposes; but, in the development of the Constitution, the nation has naturally become of overshadowing importance…
For the same reason, the dual system of government has been profoundly modified by the great elemental forces of our mechanical age, so that the scales, which try to hold in nice equipoise the Federal Government on the one hand and the…
They did not anticipate, and could not have anticipated, the centripetal influences of steam and electricity which have woven the American people into an indissoluble unit for commercial and many other purposes.
The framers, however, did not sufficiently reckon with the mechanical changes in society that were then beginning.
The Constitution, however, developed the idea of a dual citizenship.
On the other hand, this change of attitude has led, in many instances, to government by organized minorities, for, with the division of the masses into political parties, it is easy for an organized minority to hold the balance of power…
It was never contemplated that the people should directly select the President, but that a chosen body of electors should, with careful deliberation, make this momentous choice.
In this they were true prophets, for the American people have refused to limit democracy as narrowly and rigidly as the framers of the Constitution clearly intended.
Notwithstanding the oppression and injustice experienced among us from democracy, the genius of the people is in favour of it, and the genius of the people must be consulted.
Undoubtedly, the framers of the Constitution in thus limiting popular rule did not take sufficient account of the genius of an English-speaking people.
Such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, and have often been found incompatible with the personal security and rights of property, and have generally been as short in their lives as they have been violent in…
A pure democracy, by which I mean a State consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.
Give all the power to the few and they will oppress the many.
Give all the power to the many and they will oppress the few.
Measured by present-day conventions of democracy, the Constitution is an undemocratic document.
Moreover, they gave to the President the power to nullify laws passed by a majority of the House and Senate by his simple veto, and yet, fearful of an unqualified power of the President in this respect, they provided that the veto itself…
Thus they denied the power of a majority to alter even the form of government.
They believed that the utmost concession that could be safely made to democracy was the power to select suitable men to legislate for the common good, and nothing is more striking in the Constitution than the care with which they sought to…
In this freedom from empiricism and sturdy adherence to the realities of life, it can be profitably commended to all nations which may attempt a similar task.
Its mandates have the simplicity and directness of the Ten Commandments, and, like the Decalogue, it consists more of what shall not be done than what shall be done.
They had suffered grievously for more than ten years from misrule and had a distaste for mere phrase-making, of which they had had a satiety, for the Constitution, in which there is not a wasted word, is as cold and dry a document as a…
Hard realities and not generous and impossible abstractions interested them.
Politicians like James Beck
