576 CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 



Warned by this experience, the framers of the new constitution 

 wrote a method of amendment into this instrument which they 

 expected could be and would be effectively exercised. 



It was exercised, first, to limit the powers of the central govern- 

 ment in behalf of the individual, to perfect the realm of individual 

 immunity against the powers of the central government, which 

 was in the line of true progress. It was applied, in the second place, 

 in behalf of the exemption of the states from the jurisdiction of the 

 United States courts, which was the first result in constitutional law 

 of the reaction of 1793 against the national movement of 1787. 

 And it was employed in the third place to cure some of the defects 

 in the election of the president and vice-president. Then for more 

 than sixty years, while the mightiest changes were being realized 

 in the social, political, industrial, commercial, and educational 

 conditions of the country, not one trace of any of them found its 

 way into the constitutional law of the nation. 



We may say that the main direction of the movement in the social, 

 political, and economic elements down beneath the constitution 

 was, whether consciously recognized or not, towards limiting the 

 powers of the states of the Union in behalf of the powers of the cen- 

 tral government and the liberty of the individual. The pressure of 

 the movement was so strongly felt by so great a portion of the 

 people of the country, and so strongly resisted by another great 

 portion, that it led to the appeal to arms of 1861. The method of 

 amendment, intended for every exigency, had proved itself unequal 

 to the emergency, and when employed again in the last three consti- 

 tutional changes, it simply registered the results of battle. In the 

 main, what was then and thus accomplished was correct in sub- 

 stance, but the method which was necessitated showed again that 

 nothing like the perfect principle and form of constitutional amend- 

 ment had been reached. 



And now, again, for thirty-five years mighty changes have been 

 wrought in the structure of our political and civil society, and in 

 our commercial and industrial relations, and yet not one of them 

 has been registered, by the process of amendment, in our constitu- 

 tional law. 



From this brief review it seems entirely manifest that the method 

 of amendment provided in the constitution of the United States is 

 ordinarily unworkable, and that the first problem of the constitu- 

 tional law of the present in this country, as well as in almost all 

 other countries, is the revision of the provision for constitutional 

 amendment. Let us now scrutinize a little more closely the details 

 of the provision in order to make its defects clear and definite. At 

 the very first glance we discover that really four methods of amend- 

 ment are legalized by the provision. The first method authorizes 



