No one can read the acts of ratification in which these proposed amendments were incorporated or added without being impressed by the fear of the States that they were hazarding their hard-earned liberties in this experiment. It is easy to make light of them in the successful experience of a hundred years. It is clear now that whatever precautions the States took would be swept aside by the hand of necessity, and that later generations would repudiate some of the principles laid down in their manifestos. It is useless to demand consistency in a growing body. How futile for Virginia and Rhode Island, for instance, to declare that all power granted under the Constitution proceeds from the people of the United States and that, whenever the same is perverted, it may be resumed by them! Being adopted in State conventions and voicing the sentiment of the people in these established groups, is it unlikely that they meant the people of the United States as grouped into the several States precisely as they had formed and were now adopting their Constitution? Yet a generation or two later, Virginia was to be told that she meant the people of the entire United States, regardless of State lines, and in this opinion the people of Rhode Island in that generation would join. How useless for South Carolina to make as part of her ratification the precautionary statement that no part of the Constitution should ever be construed so that the States might be deprived of any power not expressly relinquished by them! How fruitless for New Hampshire to stipulate that all powers not expressly delegated by the Constitution should be reserved to the several States to be exercised by them! How profitless fate was to make the stipulations of New York that Congress should never lay any kind of excise except on ardent spirits, and that the clauses in the Constitution forbidding Congress to do certain things should not be construed into a permission to do anything except that which was named in the document! Time was soon to demonstrate the folly of attempting to place these barriers in the path of progress. Under such restrictions, the new Government would have been as helpless as the old, unless new powers had been added to it from time to time by the precarious method of amendment. Advancement must have been hindered constantly by waiting on the slow process of adding provisions to the Constitution. Such crises as the purchase of Louisiana, the suppression of domestic insurrection, and the adjustment of the national finances after the War of 1812 could never have been met because of constitutional limitations.