Experience was the fountain from which the Constitution-makers drew their "inspiration." A novel creation, as a certain narrow provincialism in the United States is sometimes fond of claiming for the Constitution, would have been an assembling of theoretical machinery, of untried experiments, which could not have met the shock of being suddenly put into motion to replace a broken down system. It could not have won back, solely on its merits, the confidence of the discouraged people. If it had been "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man," it could scarcely have withstood the vicissitudes of a growing people for over a century, with amendment in four particulars only. More experiments and less experience might have required the adoption of more of the fifteen hundred amendments which have been proposed to the Constitution in these hundred years. Experience is a safe ground upon which to build. Gouverneur Morris demolished a vast amount of eulogy when he wrote to a correspondent in France that some boasted the Constitution as a work from Heaven, while others gave it a less righteous origin. "I have many reasons to believe," said this matter-of-fact man, who bore such a large part in recasting the phraseology of the document, "that it was the work of plain, honest men." As matter is not created in any of its forms, but simply assumes new combinations by its own laws or under the guidance of man, so apparently new models in statecraft may be resolved by analysis into old ideas in new combinations. The American Constitution is the English system of government adapted to American soil through the intervening colonial and state governments. The president is the king through the royal governor, but shorn of his prerogative, descent, and perpetuity in the transition. The Senate is the House of Lords, with its permanency changed into a long tenure of office by passing through the colonial council. To the same intermediate State is due the power of appointment to office and of treaty-making which the Senate shares with the executive, thus reviving the relation of the privy council, chosen from the House of Lords, to the King. The House of Representatives is copied directly from the popular assembly of the colonial government, which in turn was modelled after the British Commons. The right of originating bills of revenue, which the Representatives possess, was preserved in many a contest between colonial assemblies and royal governors. It is the birthright of Englishmen, dating from the Petition of Right granted by Charles I., which substituted fixed taxes for forced loans and gifts. The national supreme judiciary, the most novel of the three divisions of the National Government, embodies in its appellate principles the Privy Council of England, to which all colonists could appeal, and the later admiralty committees of the Continental Congress, to which all cases of prizes seized in the war