Now follows a notable and yet little known scene in the drama of history. It reveals a people who, without shedding a drop of blood, calmly and deliberately¹ abolished one government, substituted another, and erected² it upon foundations which have hitherto proved enduring. Even the superstructure slowly erected upon these foundations has suffered little change in the most changing period of the world's history, and until recently its additions, few in number, have varied³ little from the plans of the original architects. The Constitution is to-day, not a ruined Parthenon, but rather as one of those Gothic masterpieces, against which the storms of passionate⁴ strife⁵ have beaten in vain. The foundations were laid at a time when disorder⁶ was rampant⁷ and anarchy⁸ widely prevalent. As I have already shown in my first lecture, credit was gone, business paralysed, lawlessness triumphant⁹, and not only between class and class, but between State and State, there were acute controversies¹⁰ and an alarming disunity of spirit. To weld thirteen jealous and discordant¹¹ States, demoralized by an exhausting war, into a unified¹² and efficient nation against their wills, was a seemingly impossible task. Frederick the so-called Great had said that a federal union of widely

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