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This fear has influenced the constitution-makers to settle upon three candidates from among whom the president must be elected. Then it may be asked why not fix upon one man instead of upon three since you have already deprived the people of part of their freedom? The answer is that: there is not a single man whose qualifications are high enough to be the successor.
They have now a nominal president; but his election is indirect, his office is representative, not political, and his duties are like an impersonal, colorless reflection of those performed by the English crown. The constitution-makers simply could not fall back on an experience of successful free government which did not exist.
They were hindered constantly from rash action by inherited prejudices and climatic differences. And they were conscious at the end of having wrought, not perfectly, but as well as conditions would permit. Experience was the fountain from which the Constitution-makers drew their "inspiration."
Many earlier ideals of the constitution-makers had long since been conveniently obscured or nullified by decisions, appeals to the federal government, appeals to the state government, communal contracts, and the like fine cobwebby figments, all, but sufficient, just the same, to render inoperative the original intention.
This fear has influenced the constitution-makers to settle upon three candidates from among whom the president must be elected. Then it may be asked why not fix upon one man instead of upon three since you have already deprived the people of part of their freedom? The answer is that: there is not a single man whose qualifications are high enough to be the successor.
There was an awakening of the mind, in physics as well as in politics, at that period; and it must be confessed that the natural philosophers have succeeded better than the constitution-makers. Paine's mechanical hobby was an iron bridge. A single arch, of four hundred feet span, and twenty feet in height from the chord-line, was to be thrown over the Schuylkill, near Philadelphia.
And in 1791 they seemed as far from realizing their hopes of betterment as they had been in 1789, for the bourgeois constitution-makers had provided that only taxpayers could vote and only property-owners could hold office.
This system of choosing a President through a set of electors, borrowed from the method of electing a German emperor, was far removed from democracy. It showed the distrust which the Constitution-makers felt in the intelligence and discrimination of the masses. Irregularity marked the elections generally.
All through the organic laws of the Nation and the States there are to be found restraints on numbers, as if the leading idea of the Constitution-makers of America were aversion to mere majorities, things that fluctuate from year to year, almost from day to day, and therefore are not to be trusted.
It was now declared that only church-members should have the right of citizenship, and that a committee of twelve should be appointed to choose seven others who were to be the constitution-makers.
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