Thus was this assembly of great and patriotic men brought finally to a stand, by the singular urgency with which opposite theories, springing from local interests and objects, were sought to be pressed into a constitution of government, that was to be accepted by communities widely differing in extent, in numbers, and in wealth, and in all that constitutes political power, and which were at the same time to remain distinct and separate States. As we look back to the possibility of a failure to create a constitution, and try to divest ourselves of the identity which the success of that experiment has given to our national life, the imagination wanders over a dreary waste of seventy years, which it can only fill with strange images of desolation. That the administration of Washington should never have existed; that Marshall should never have adjudicated, or Jackson conquered; that the arts, the commerce, the letters of America should not have taken the place which they hold in the affairs of the world; that instead of this great Union of prosperous and powerful republics, made one prosperous and powerful nation, history should have had nothing to show and nothing to record but border warfare and the conflicts of worn-out communities, the sport of the old clashing policies of Europe; that self-government should have become one of the exploded delusions with which mankind have successively deceived themselves, and republican institutions have been made only another name for anarchy and social disorder;--all these things seem at once inconceivable and yet probable,--at once the fearful conjurings of fancy, and the inevitable deductions of reason.
We know not what combinations, what efforts, might have followed the separation of that convention of American statesmen, without having accomplished the work for which they had been assembled. We do know, that, if _they_ could not have succeeded in framing and agreeing upon a system of government capable of commending itself to the free choice of the people of their respective States, no other body of men in this country could have done it. We know that the Confederation was virtually at an end; that its power was exhausted, although it still held the nominal seat of authority. The Union must therefore have been dissolved into its component parts, but for the wisdom and conciliation of those who, in their original earnestness to secure a perfect theory, had thus encountered an insuperable obstacle and brought about a great hazard. I have elsewhere said that these men were capable of the highest of the moral virtues,--that their magnanimity was as great as their intellectual acuteness and strength. Let us turn to the proof on which rests their title to this distinction.