The "Fathers" didn't _mean_ that the people should decide between the merits of the candidates for the Presidency. They thought--and shall we therefore decry their wisdom?--that a small body of intelligent and well educated men, men of character and social position, accustomed to the study of public affairs, was better fitted to choose such an officer as the President of the United States than the whole mass of the people. Moreover, the people themselves have changed, and have become in substance and in condition something that the "Fathers" did not dream of. States in which the vote of the mass of the citizens should be in the hands of negroes or of emigrants from the peasant class of Europe were not among the political conditions for which their foresight provided. --The great controlling fact in our politics is this one, so little regarded not only by the general public, but by men in active political life--the thorough change which has taken place in our society and in the attitude of the people toward the Government. As a consequence of this change, political power has passed almost entirely out of the hands of the class of men to whom the framers of our Constitution intended to commit the administration of the Government which they called into being. It has fallen into those of men generally much inferior in cultivation and in position. And as we have already said, the very substance of the political constituency has changed. A suffrage practically universal and a controlling vote in one part of the country of emancipated negro slaves and in the other of uneducated foreign emigrants was not the political power to which Franklin, and Jefferson, and Hamilton and Adams, and their co-workers, supposed they were required to adapt their frame of government. And now no small part of our difficulty arises from the failure of a very large portion of our people, North as well as South, to perceive or at least fully to appreciate this change and its inevitable consequences. It is agreed by all students of political history, that the weakness of a written constitution lies in its inflexibility; and the error of many of our political managers lies in their failure to appreciate this truth and their assumption that the country is to be governed now just as it was in the days of Washington. But the fact is that such a condition of political affairs as now exists in South Carolina and in Louisiana would have been not only morally but physically impossible in the earlier years of the republic. "The people" in those States, and to a certain extent in all the States, but chiefly at the South, has not the same meaning that it had three-quarters of a century ago. Over the whole country the conditions of our political problem have changed; but most of all there; and the result is a strain upon our political institutions, and even upon our social institutions, which taxes their stability to the utmost. The present crisis is only inferior in its