to interfere with the "domestic institutions," including slavery, of any State, was passed in both Houses, but never submitted to the States, because war broke out immediately afterwards. It would doubtless, had peace been preserved, have failed to obtain the acceptance of three-fourths of the States, and its effect could only have been to require those who might thereafter propose to amend the Constitution so as to deal with slavery, to propose also the repeal of this particular amendment itself.[1]
The moral of these facts is not far to seek. Although it has long been the habit of the Americans to talk of their Constitution with almost superstitious reverence, there have often been times when leading statesmen, perhaps even political parties, would have materially altered it if they could have done so. There have, moreover, been some alterations suggested in it, which the impartial good sense of the wise would have approved, but which have never been submitted to the States, because it was known they could not be carried by the requisite majority.[2] If, therefore, comparatively little use
- ↑ The Greek republics of antiquity sometimes placed some particular law under a special sanction by denouncing the penalty of death on any one who should propose to repeal it. In such cases, the man who intended to repeal the law so sanctioned of course began by proposing the repeal of the law which imposed the penalty. So it would have been in this case: so it must always be. No sovereign body can limit its own powers. The British Parliament seems to have attempted to bind itself by providing in the Act of Union with Ireland (39 and 40 George III., c. 67) that the maintenance of the Protestant Episcopal Church as an Established Church in Ireland should be "deemed an essential and fundamental part of the Union." That Church was, however, disestablished in 1869 with as much ease as though this provision had never existed.
- ↑ In the Forty-ninth Congress (1884-86) no fewer than forty-seven propositions were introduced for the amendment of the Constitution, some of them of a sweeping, several of a rather complex, nature. (Some of these covered the same ground, so the total number of alterations proposed was less than forty-seven.) None seems to have been voted on by Congress; and only five or six even deserved serious consideration. One at least, that enabling the President to veto items in an appropriation bill, would have effected a great improvement. I find among them the following proposals: To prohibit the sale of alcoholic liquors, to forbid polygamy, to confer the suffrage on women, to vest the election of the President directly in the people, to elect representatives for three instead of two years, to choose senators by popular election, to empower Congress to limit the hours of labour, to empower Congress to pass uniform laws regarding marriage and divorce, to enable the people to elect certain Federal officers, to forbid Congress to pass any local private or special enactment, to forbid Congress to direct the payment of claims legally barred by lapse of time, to forbid the States to hire out the labour of prisoners.
In the first session of the Fifty-first Congress twenty-eight such propositions
