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Updated: May 27, 2025
This idea had been elaborated by Montesquieu, and deeply affected the constitution-making of the eighteenth century both in France and in the United States. Nominally the executive authority resided in the hereditary king. In this respect, most of the French reformers thought they were imitating the British government, but as a matter of fact they made the kingship not even ornamental.
So did the heirs of the ages avoid the mistakes of the past by seeking the results of the law of the survival of the fittest. They form a strong contrast with another people, less fitted by inheritance for self-government, who were at about the same time entering upon the task of constitution-making.
All over England strenuous politicians, catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France free and illustrious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to convey to a confident, constitution-making National Assembly the assurance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed and moved in unison with their desires.
Unfortunately for inventors, the times were not favorable for the construction of boats or of bridges. A taste had sprung up in France for constitution-making, one of the most difficult and expensive of public works.
The effect of a state veto on an act of Congress would be to compel the latter to choose between abandoning the law in question as unconstitutional and appealing to the constitution-making power in defense of its claim.
It was simpler than its forerunner, since there was no longer any need of the cumbrous temporary machinery for the revision of the whole system of government, nor for the numerous committees and commissions to which previously so many functions had been assigned. The main tasks before the new rulers were not constitution-making but administration and defence.
Meanwhile a few clear-headed and positive observers were dimly conscious of the instability of merely speculative constitution-making. Varchi, in a weighty passage on the defects of the Florentine republic, points out that its weakness arose partly from the violence of factions, but also in a great measure from the implicit faith reposed in doctors of the law.
I generally answer that, in the first place, a convention is a constitution-making agency with which the English public is totally unfamiliar, and that, in the second place, Englishmen's temper is too imperial, or rather imperious, to make the idea of discussion on equal terms with the Irish at all acceptable.
Monteverde, in January of that year, was cooped up in the remote province of Guiana, and Coro on the sea-coast was also held by his troops; but elsewhere the new Republic seemed fully established. Already the point of Constitution-making the crystallization-point of republics had been reached. The ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade.
A majority of the deputies meant well. They were earnest, patriotic, and enthusiastic. But they knew nothing of the science of government or of constitution-making, which demand the highest maturity of experience and wisdom. As I have said, nearly four hundred of them were country lawyers, as conceited as they were inexperienced. Both Mirabeau and Sieyès had a supreme contempt for them as a whole.
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