286 POLITICS 



ticular times. It was under color of an interpretation of a written 

 constitution that Charles X of France issued his July Ordinances 

 and precipitated the Revolution of 1830; it was by an interpretation 

 of the Prussian constitution that Bismarck carried through his policy 

 of the conflict time - - an interpretation, moreover, which he, with 

 characteristic cynicism, readily abandoned when it ceased to serve 

 his purpose; and it was through interpretation that the constitution 

 of the United States - - the written constitution par excellence, the 

 most wonderful instrument, according to Mr. Gladstone, ever struck 

 off at a given moment by the thought and purpose of man was 

 made the basis for the resolute efforts of two great masses of fellow 

 citizens to annihilate each other. 



The written constitution had, indeed, done its work by the time 

 it had become generally prevalent. In its true character it was 

 found to be not an indispensable feature of every sound political 

 system, but merely an ingenious expedient for facilitating the trans- 

 ition from one system to another. Through it the political ideals 

 and characteristic principles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth 

 centuries have been crystallized and put into form for permanent 

 exhibition. Political antiquarians are thus enabled to study the 

 past at their ease; lawyers can wrangle and construe and assert 

 sometimes with real belief at the basis of their assertion - - that in 

 the articles and sections and phrases and words of the document 

 are to be seen the essence of the state; but behind and all around 

 the scanty code the real life of the body politic goes serenely on, 

 regardless of all the puny efforts to cramp and fetter it. 



In the development of nineteenth-century constitutionalism, the 

 chief types - - the unwritten and the written, or, in the terms sug- 

 gested by Mr. Bryce, the flexible and the rigid - - have been fur- 

 nished by Great Britain and the United States respectively. In 

 the long run the British type has proved the more permanent; for 

 the limitations on government and on sovereignty itself, which were 

 originally the characteristic mark of American constitutionalism, 

 have in large measure disappeared, and on the impressive but unstable 

 foundation of necessity and destiny has arisen for the contemplation 

 of mankind that structure which to the forefathers would have 

 seemed such a monstrosity - - the unwritten constitution of the 

 United States. 



II 



The second period of the nineteenth century, embracing the dec- 

 ades from the sixth to the ninth inclusive, has, for the controlling 

 topics of its politics, both theoretical and practical, nationalism 

 and socialism. This is the period of Bismarck and Lincoln, of Karl 

 Marx, and, equally significant in the opposite sense, of Herbert 





