468 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. fused. We must disentangle views of political theory, political morals, constitutional policy, and doctrines as to that convenient refuge for loose thinking which is vaguely called the "spirit" of the Constitution, from doctrines of constitutional law. Very often this is not carefully and consistently done. And so it happens, as one looks back over our history and the field of political discus- sions in the past, that he seems to see the whole region strewn with the wrecks of the Constitution, — of what people have been imagining and putting forward as the Constitution. That it was unconstitutional to buy Louisiana and Florida; that it was uncon- stitutional to add new states to the Union from territory not belonging originally to it; that it was unconstitutional to govern the territories at all ; that it was unconstitutional to charter a bank, to issue paper money, to make it a legal tender, to enact a protective tariff, — that these and a hundred other things were a violation of the Constitution, has been solemnly and passionately asserted by statesmen and lawyers. Nothing that is now going forward can exceed the vehemence of denunciation, and the pathetic and conscientious resistance of those who lifted up their voices against many of these supposed violations of the Constitution. The trouble has been, then as now, that men imputed to our funda- mental law their own too narrow construction of it, their own theory of its purposes and its spirit, and sought thus, when the question was one of mere power, to restrict its great liberty. That instrument, astonishingly well adapted for the purposes of a great, developing nation, shows its wisdom mainly in the shortness and generahty of its provisions, in its silence, and its abstinence from petty limitations. As it survives fierce controversies from age to age, it is forever silently bearing witness to the wisdom that went into its composition, by showing itself suited to the purposes of a great people under circumstances that no one of its makers could have foreseen. Men have found, as they are finding now, when new and unlooked-for situations have presented themselves, that they were left with liberty to handle them. Of this quality in the Constitution people sometimes foolishly talk as if it meant that the great barriers of this instrument have been set at naught, and may be set at naught, in great exigencies ; as if it were always ready to give way under pressure ; and as if statesmen were always stand- ing ready to violate it when important enough occasion arose. What generally happens, however, on these occasions, is that the littleness and the looseness of men's interpretation of the Constitu-
