CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 569 



I beg you yet to consider how that conception of liberty, appearing 

 so simple and undoubted to our fathers, was modified in face of the 

 new necessity of the modern state, and with its modifications exer- 

 cises the most decisive influence on the development of constitu- 

 tional law. Many of your constitutions, like those of Alabama, 

 perhaps the most explicit, are still openly declaring that the sole 

 object and only legitimate end of government is to protect citizens 

 in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and adds that when 

 the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppres- 

 sion. In analogy to such principles all your political machinery 

 asks essentially from the government to assure the general well- 

 being and considers as an enemy whoever is contrasting in this way 

 the opinion of the majority, although that majority has in our days, 

 as in the time of A. de Tocqueville, its tyrannies. 1 But meanwhile 

 in America, also, this classic conception of the state is modifying 

 itself, and new constitutional laws, always more detailed and com- 

 plicated, are joined to those already existing. 



You know it, but to a European it helps remembering it syn- 

 thetically. Here no one thinks of restraining the political suffrage 

 that we can now call universal, and it would be an enterprise more 

 difficult than to change the course of the Mississippi, but under the 

 old forms of the restrained and partisan caucus rouses the conceit of 

 public preparatory elections; in almost all states the registration 

 of the electors becomes obligatory, and the lists are every year 

 examined with an ever serious guaranty, the electoral chairs are 

 presided over by citizens named by the judges and assisted by the 

 representatives of the candidates; the ballot is always more guar- 

 antied. Thus becomes prevalent the system of assigning different 

 days for the different elections, whilst the number of elective offices 

 is notably restricted. Developing the fruitful germs embodied in 

 your first constitutions, you are increasing ever more the prohibition 

 to make laws on determinate subjects, to preserve untouched the 

 uniform action of the regulating laws of persons and properties 

 condition, preventing the guaranties in the manner of proceeding 

 from being altered, whilst the same constitutions are limiting or 

 regulating the assessment of the tax and the faculty to contract 

 debts. 



To the annual sections are substituted the biennial sections, re- 

 nouncing to that which seemed to the colonies such a supreme 

 guaranty to induce them to rebel against the third Stuart ; the 

 duration of these sections is always brief, so that only the necessary 

 laws be passed; even the ancient Roman wisdom considered too 

 many laws as a corruption of republic: Corruptissima republica 

 plurimae leges. Finally, the bills in extremis and the political riders 

 1 Dtmocratie en Am&rique, part n, chap, vii, sec. 3. 



