The Constitution is and was intended to be rigid only in the sense that it effectually limits the power of the majority. The founders of our government were not averse to such changes in the system which they established as would promote or at least not interfere with their main purpose--the protection of the minority against the majority. Indeed, they intended that the Constitution as framed should be modified, amended and gradually molded by judicial interpretation into the form which they desired to give it, but which the necessity of minimizing popular opposition prevented them from accomplishing at the outset. Amendment by judicial interpretation was merely a means of conferring indirectly on the minority a power which the Constitution expressly denied to the majority. No hint of this method of minority amendment, however, was contained in the Constitution itself. But, on the contrary, any such view of the Constitution would have been negatived by the general theory of checks and balances which, consistently applied, would limit the power of the minority as well as that of the majority. It was not reasonable to suppose that the Constitution contemplated placing in the hands of the minority a power which it was so careful to withold from the majority. In fact, the language of the Constitution warranted the belief that it was intended as a means of checking the general government itself by protecting the states in the exercise of all those powers not expressly denied to them. And since the Constitution, as we have seen, merely marked off the limits of federal and state jurisdiction, without specifying how the general government on the one hand, or the state government on the other, was to be kept within the territory assigned to it, it was natural to suppose that it contemplated giving to each the same means of protecting itself against the encroachments of the other.