effort to comprehend them, and for the most part, every new attempt to render their meaning more clear has only tended to envelop it in greater obscurity. Indeed, of all disputes, those concerning the precise meaning of words in their application to things, are the most difficult to settle, especially when two or more parties of opposite views and interests are concerned. But there is one rule which is infallible. They should always be understood and interpreted in the mode which best harmonizes with the general spirit and intention of the instruments of which they form a part. This government, as based on the Constitution, is confessed on all hands to be one of limited powers; and it would thus appear that no provision, no phrase, and no word in that instrument should be so interpreted as to involve the exercise of a power in its nature unlimited. The meaning of every word in the Constitution should, we think, be construed by this simple rule, and not by a reference to quibbling municipal lawyers, or pedantic compilers of diction aries. The celebrated Algernon Sidney, whose work on Government stands side by side, and on an equal footing with that of Locke, in a tract entitled, "A General View of Government in Europe," thus speaks of lawyers in contradistinction to statesmen with reference to questions involving the great principles of civil liberty. "The civilians with their Bartolus and Baldus are not to dictate to us on this occasion. We must not be confined to the writers of this or that age or country; but consult the universal reason and sense of human kind where civil government has been exercised. "Much less is any particular profession or faction of writers to be the only authors of credit in this inquiry. Our knowledge should be something digested; and an impartial result obtained from a consideration of all, as well times and countries, as writers and customs. "Then, for the municipal lawyers of every nation, they are educated under too narrow a dispensation to think justly in these matters. The letter, and not the spirit, is the sphere where they show their activity, even sometimes to the perverting and turning against the reason and intentions of the legislator. Their small niceties, their subtilties, and their inferences are too fine-drawn to bear and support a matter of this weight and consequence. Their arguments and their deductions must ever be taken with some grains of allowance; the cause here requires other forms and considerations. We are not to stick at the letter, but go to the foundation, to the inside and essence of things." Without intending the slightest disrespect to any class or profession, we think we may venture to say, and appeal to history to sustain us, that professional men seldom make great statesmen. The study of the Holy Scriptures was not intended to make politicians or philosophers; the anatomy and diseases of the human body are very different from those of a state; and the lawyer is governed by the opinions of others instead of his own. The views of the statesman are progressive; he must be always looking forward; those of the lawyer are always over his shoulder. He has no other guide than cases of law, and no authority but precedents. He seldom goes beyond these, and consequently too often discusses a constitutional question pretty much as he would an action for assault and battery, or a suit at law between John Doe and Richard Roe. Instead of grappling with great general principles, or as Sidney expresses it, "consulting the universal sense and reason of mankind where civil government has been exercised," he relies altogether on the diction of some favorite oracle, and implicitly believes a thing only because some distinguished men believed it some centuries ago. While boasting perhaps, that this age is preeminently wiser and more enlightened than any which preceded it, he gropes in the rubbish of the past, and the deeper and darker the pool from which he can fish up his authorities, the more obligatory he considers the precedent, without ever seeming aware that the reasons on which it was founded have long ceased to operate, or that it may have never had any foundation in reason. It would appear, however, from the difficulty in comprehending it, that the Constitution, take it as a whole, is a riddle which baffles all the inspiration of the soothsayers. This seems as strange as it is mortifying. The clearest intellects, the brightest minds, the most experienced sages of our country were for months deliberately occupied in framing that instrument. When the Convention had got through with its provisions, a committee consisting of some of its most distinguished members, was appointed to arrange and classify the powers delegated to the different branches of the government, that they might be presented as clearly and distinctly as possible. This was accordingly done; and thus the Constitution came forth complete in all its parts, like Minerva from the head of Jove, the result of the combined wisdom and experience of as wise and virtuous a body of men as perhaps ever assembled in any country on any occasion. Yet it seems that the result of all this combined wisdom and experience is only an inexplicable enigma-a second edition of the Riddle of the Sphynx. Nay worse: for that admitted but of one interpretation, whereas if we place any reliance in the perverted ingenuity of Congressional logic, it is capable of being construed in direct opposition both to its spirit and provisions. Far be it from us to pretend to be wiser than the collected wisdom of the nation. All we claim is, that we are more disinterested, at least in the interpretation of that most flexible phrase, "the common defense and general welfare." We aspire to no share in the "alternate sections;" are no candidates for a "homestead," having an humble one of our own already; belong to no clique or association for purchasing landwarrants; have not, like Mr. Somebody, any copy-right to sell for $10,000, or like Mr. Colt, any patent to renew; we humbly hope we shall never run mad, and thus become one of the heirs of the ten millions of acres; and though some of our ances tors will be found in the history of the Revolutionary War, we will venture to assert not one of their posterity ever applied for a pension or a grant of lands for doing his duty in defending his country. Looking then at the Constitution, without the slightest reference to personal or party interests; being rather too old to aspire to political distinction by bribing our constituency with a few millions of acres belonging to other people, for some great public improvement; and being in fact mere lookers-on at the great game of politics, it is possible that according to the old adage, we may see more clearly than the players themselves. To us then, the Constitution of the United States seems one of the simplest, clearest, most explicit productions that ever emanated from human brain, and as easily comprehended as the ten commandments. Nor do we believe any ambiguity will ever be found in its provisions, except when attempts are made to stretch them beyond their legitimate meaning. It is plain in its principles, and specific in its provisions. It exhibits no flourishes of rhetoric, no flights of imagination, no metaphorical illustrations, no philosophical disquisitions, no metaphysical subtilties. It is couched in such language as all Americans speak and understand in the ordinary intercourse of life without study or reflection, and requires neither glossary nor commentator. So far from this, like all other writings whose meaning is clear and transparent, it may with truth be said, that, with the exception of the Federalist, all attempts to make it better understood, have only resulted in clouding its meaning. It was like demonstrating a self-evident proposition. That so many of the highest names and brightest intellects of this country should differ so widely in the interpretation of some few of its most important provisions, and that a great portion of the people of the United States have followed their example, is only one of the thousand proofs presented in the history of man of the extent to which the human mind may be influenced by interest, passion, prejudice, education, and example. The surest, indeed the only way to avoid constitutional difficulties, is to keep clear of special legislation. Since experience has shown that those general laws which alone involve the common defense and general welfare, are seldom, if ever, liable to constitutional objections. But whenever Congress begins to legislate for a few instead of the whole, conflicts of interest inevitably arise. The entire system of our government is based on individual and state equality, and when this great principle is violated, the system is disturbed at its very foundations; the machine grates at every motion; and in place of the common defense and general welfare, we have nothing but conflicts or combinations of local and sectional interests equally subversive of both. ON A CHINAMAN IN BROADWAY. SITS he by the dusty footway throughout the torrid day. When our curious childhood marvelled at figures quaintly wrought And what strange, discordant background the curious picture hath! Not the tall Pagoda's summit, not the tea trees, stunted train, Not the pointed roofs of Pekin, not the flat, unvaried plain, But the world's great heart pants round thee, a rushing progress sweeps Thy vague, unwoken being along its sounding deeps. And thou might'st look upon us with more unveiled surprise, From out the sleepy shadow of Asiatic eyes; For the Great Wall long had fortressed thy tilled and peopled plains- While the long grass waved untrodden, where our millioned home appears, How the wild Sierra gleameth, with gold in every cleft; For strong hands guard the treasure-the rock to thee is left. And us you lose not ever-we will be there anon- |