American History in the Secondary School ARTHUR M. WOLFSON, PH.D., Editor THE CONSTITUTION--ITS ANTECEDENTS, ITS FORMATION, AND ITS ADOPTION. The study of the Constitution of the United States involves two more or less distinct processes. If the student is to comprehend it perfectly, he must consider it, first, as an historical document, studying its antecedents, the process of its creation, and the method of its adoption; second, he must consider it as it exists at present, the ground plan upon which our national institutions have been reared, and under which the Government of the United States is still being operated. A generation ago the opinion was almost universally received that our present constitution was the result of the superhuman skill of the two or three score men who sat and deliberated in the State House in Philadelphia from May 25th to September 17th, 1787. Even Gladstone, whose knowledge of history and politics should have taught him better, seems to have lent himself to this theory, for in contrasting the English and the American Constitutions, he declares that, “As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” To-day this theory has been entirely abandoned. For this reason, the student must be brought to consider the Constitution as an historical as well as a political document, seeking its origins in the institutions of England and the English colonies, acquainting himself with the personality and the theories of the men who sat in the Convention, following the debates and the newspaper discussions which in every State were the preliminary steps to its ratification.