The men who builded the Constitution were consumed by no senseless adulation of their own handicraft. They were not possessed of the delusion that they were inspired, neither did they dream that future generations would search the record of their quarrels and selfish compromises for the key which would enable them to solve problems as they arose. They planned a document for the regulation of a people whom they believed unfitted for more than a small share in the affairs of government. They were not blind to its imperfections, but they assumed that those who came after them would have the sense to remedy defects as they developed under the operation of the system then timidly launched. There is this justification for the worship of the founders of the Constitution, viz., they had the common sense to revise and modify their governmental charter so as to conform to new conditions—a trait or an instinct of which hardly a trace remains in their descendants. In the popular parlance of those days the proposed Constitution was called “The New Roof,” and its founders urged the people to get under it and keep out of the rain. It is difficult to address an appeal to a people which prefers to venerate that roof on account of its antiquity, rather than to repair the innumerable leaks and fissures due to decay and to the gales and storms of more than a hundred years. The man who venerates any work of human origin is an ass. His asininity is exactly in degree with the smallness of the objects selected for his veneration. The man who humbly lowers his eyes in contemplation of a political constitution proclaims a lack of mental breadth fitted to comprehend humanity or to understand the plain lessons of history, and he has insulted the one entity worthy of veneration—the Maker of the Universe. In a preceding article I proved that the framers of the Constitution distrusted the people almost to the point of hatred, and that they deliberately planned to design a document which would give them the semblance of popular rule but none of its substance. This is an unquestioned historical fact. Its declaration may seem startling to those who are confronted with the unvarnished truth for the first time, but they will find it refreshing to study the real history of those days, rather than ignorantly to worship demigods who never existed. Immutable laws cannot be coexistent with progress. We should study the past, not for the purpose of supinely imitating it, but with a view of profiting by its mistakes. That government is best which avoids the pitfalls of the past, exists for those who live today, and erects no barriers for the generations that will follow.