[Sidenote: In the American state there is a power above the legislature.] Toward the close of the preceding chapter[1] I spoke of three points especially characteristic of the American state, and I went on to mention two of them. The third point which I had in mind is so remarkable and important as to require a chapter all to itself. In the American state the legislature is not supreme, but has limits to its authority prescribed by a written document, known as the Constitution; and if the legislature happens to pass a law which violates the constitution, then whenever a specific case happens to arise in which this statute is involved, it can be brought before the courts, and the decision of the court, if adverse to the statute, annuls it and renders it of no effect. The importance of this feature of civil government in the United States can hardly be overrated. It marks a momentous advance in civilization, and it is especially interesting as being peculiarly American. Almost everything else in our fundamental institutions was brought by our forefathers in a more or less highly developed condition from England; but the development of the written constitution, with the consequent relation of the courts to the law-making power, has gone on entirely upon American soil. [Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.] [Sidenote: Germs of the idea of a written constitution.] [Sidenote: Our indebtedness to the Romans.] [Sidenote: Mediæval charters.] The germs of the written constitution existed a great while ago. Perhaps it would not be easy to say just when they began to exist. It was formerly supposed by such profound thinkers as Locke and such persuasive writers as Rousseau, that when the first men came together to live in civil society, they made a sort of contract with one another as to what laws they would have, what beliefs they would entertain, what customs they would sanction, and so forth. This theory of the Social Contract was once famous, and exerted a notable influence on political history, and it is still interesting in the same way that spinning-wheels and wooden frigates and powdered wigs are interesting; but we now know that men lived in civil society, with complicated laws and customs and creeds, for many thousand years before the notion had ever entered anybody's head that things could be regulated by contract. That notion we owe chiefly to the ancient Romans, and it took them several centuries to comprehend the idea and put it into practice. We owe them a debt of gratitude for it. The custom of regulating business and politics and the affairs of life generally by voluntary but binding agreements is something without which we moderns would not think life worth living. It was after the Roman world--that is to say, Christendom, for in the Middle Ages the two terms were synonymous--had become thoroughly familiar with the idea of contract, that the practice grew up of granting written charters to towns, or monasteries, or other corporate bodies. The