A written constitution adopted by popular vote affords, perhaps, some of the nicest tests of theory. Here we have the most specific form of popular assent. In such a document the powers of the government are explicitly set forth and specifically lodged; and the means by which they may be differently constituted or bestowed are definitively determined. Now we know that these documents are the result of experience, the outcome of a contest of forces, the fruits of struggle. Nations have taken knowledge of despotism. They have seen authority abused and have refused to submit; have perceived justice to be arbitrary and hidden away in secret tribunals, and have insisted that it be made uniform and open; have seen ministers chosen from among favorites, and have demanded that they be taken from among representatives of the people; have found legislation regardful of classes, and have clamored to have laws made by men selected without regard to class; have felt obedience irksome because government was disordered in form and confused in respect of responsibility, and have insisted that responsibility be fixed and forms of order and publicity observed. Sometimes only a steady practice has accomplished all this; sometimes documentary securities have been demanded. These documentary securities are written constitutions. It is easy, as it is also impressive, to believe that a written constitution proceeds from the people, and constitutes their sovereign behest concerning government. But of course it does not. It proceeds always either from some ordinary or from some extraordinary organ of the state; its provisions are the fruit of the debated determinations of a comparatively small deliberative body, acting usually under some form of legal commission. It is accepted as a whole and without discrimination by the diffused, undeliberative body of voters. What confuses our view is the fact that these formal documentary statements of the kinds and degrees of obedience to which the people assent, the methods of power to which they submit, the sort of responsibility upon which they insist, have become, from the very necessity of their nature, a distinct and superior sort of precise and positive law. We seek the sovereign who utters them. But they are not the utterances of a sovereign. They are the covenants of a community. Time out of mind communities have made covenants with their sovereigns. When despotism in France was ‘tempered by epigram,’ the sharp tongues of the wits spoke, after a sort, the constitution of the country,--a positive law whose sanction was ridicule. But the wits were not sovereign; the _salons_ did not conduct government. Our written constitutions are only very formal statements of the standards to which the people, upon whom government depends for support, will hold those who exercise the sovereign power.