themselves to make such changes as new circumstances may require. The meaning of the Constitution is fixed when it is adopted, and it is not different at any subsequent time when a court has occasion to pass upon it. Chief Justice Taney made the same point in the _Dred Scott_ case (19 Howard 393). It had been argued (this was in 1857) that public attitudes had changed enormously toward the Negro since the adoption of the Constitution sixty-eight years earlier. But should this shift in public attitude induce the court “to give to the words of the Constitution a more liberal construction in their favor than they were intended to bear when the instrument was framed and adopted”? Taney thought such an argument “altogether inadmissible” in any tribunal called upon to interpret the Constitution: If any of its provisions are deemed unjust, there is a mode prescribed in the instrument itself by which it may be amended; but while it remains unaltered, it must be construed now as it was understood at the time of its adoption. It is not only the same in words, but the same in meaning, and delegates the same powers to the government, and reserves and secures the same rights and privileges to the citizen; and as long as it continues to exist in its present form, it speaks not only in the same words, but with the same meaning and intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its framers, and was voted on and adopted by the people of the United States. Any other rule of construction would abrogate the judicial character of this court, and make it the mere reflex of the popular opinion or passion of the day. This court was not created by the Constitution for such purposes. Many other authorities, over a span of generations, have said substantially the same thing about the necessity of courts’ holding steadfastly to the demonstrable intention of a constitutional provision. “The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality,” Frankfurter once asserted, “is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it” (306 U. S. 491). Hughes urged his colleagues not to be swayed by arguments that extraordinary events may justify abandonment of the rule: “Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power” (245 U. S. 495). Douglas, dissenting in _New York_ v. _the United States_ (326 U. S. 572), sternly lectured his brothers on their obligations in this regard; when a constitutional rule is to be fashioned that undermines the long-understood sovereignty of the States, he said, it ought never to be done by judicial construction: “Any such change should be accomplished only by constitutional amendment.”