Constitution of the United States Showing that it is a Development of Progressive or Dutch Forms of Government By Sydney George Fisher Philadelphia J. B. Lippincott Company 1910 ROBERTA SARAH TWYFORD PARKSLEY VA Preface to the Second Edition In this second edition the work has been revised, and any changes or corrections which my correspondence indicated have been made. It seems necessary, also, to make a short statement to prevent the purpose of the book from being misunderstood. This statement was made in the first edition on page 90; but apparently it would have been well to have made it earlier, or at the end of the preface, so as to bring it to the reader's attention before he had gone far into the subject. It consists merely of this, that the book is not written for the purpose of denying that our language, literature, general principles of law, and general methods of thought came originally from England. The colonists were English, and our civilization is in a general and vague way a branch of Anglo-Saxon civilization. But our people recast and worked over again their English knowledge and experience. Moreover, any political ideas or principles which they brought over with them came from only one division of the English people. The principles brought over were not the Tory principles which have usually prevailed in the British con A stitution, but the Whig and Puritan principles of what has usually been the minority party in English history. Those Whig and Puritan principles were changed and recast by the American colonists to suit their circumstances. They developed their system of government out of their surroundings in America. They did not simply transplant British institutions, and, above all, they did not, as some suppose, copy parts of our Constitution from the British goverment as it existed in the year 1787. Preface to the First Edition HISTORIES of the Constitution usually describe the labors of its framers in the Convention of 1787 and the contests of political parties over the adoption of the instrument by the requisite number of States in the following year, together with such changes or developments as have taken place since that time. The works which have touched on its sources or origin have treated it as invented by the convention which framed it, or have sought in England or other European countries for forms of government which were like it or might have suggested its various provisions. Having for a long time been convinced that the Constitution is neither an invention nor an imitation, but almost exclusively a native product of slow and gradual growth, I have in this book undertaken to trace back, through previous American documents in colonial times, every material clause of it. These documents are very numerous, and consist of twenty-nine colonial charters and constitutions, seventeen Revolutionary constitutions, and twenty-three plans of union,-in all, sixty-nine different forms of government which were either in actual or in attempted operation in America during a period of about two hundred years, from 1584 to 1787. These constituted the school of thought, the experiments, and |