The contrary, indeed, I take to be the truth, and I think one chief cause of this imperfection in the administration of justice will be found to have been the operation of the written Constitution. For, under the American system, the Constitution, or fundamental law, is expounded by judges, and this function, which, in essence, is political, has brought precisely that quality of pressure on the bench which it has been the labor of a hundred generations of our ancestors to remove. On the whole the result has been not to elevate politics, but to lower the courts toward the political level, a result which conforms to the a priori theory.

The abstract virtue of the written Constitution was not, however, a question in issue when Washington and his contemporaries set themselves to reorganize the Confederation. Those men had no choice but to draft some kind of a platform on which the states could agree to unite, if they were to unite peacefully at all, and accordingly they met in convention and drew the best form of agreement they could; but I more than suspect that a good many very able Federalists were quite alive to the defects in the plan which they adopted.

Hamilton was outspoken in preferring the English model, and I am not aware that Washington ever expressed a preference for the theory that, because of a written fundamental law, the court should nullify legislation. Nor is it unworthy of remark that all foreigners, after a prolonged and attentive observation of our experiment, have avoided it. Since 1789, every highly civilized Western people have readjusted their institutions at least once, yet not one has in this respect imitated us, though all have borrowed freely from the parliamentary system of England.^[6]

Even our neighbor, Canada, with no adverse traditions and a population similar to ours, has been no exception to the rule. The Canadian courts