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[Illustration: Photo Henry Dixon & Son From the Portrait painted by
Harrington Mann for Gray's Inn]
The Constitution of the United States
A brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy ofthe Constitution of the United States
By James M. Beck, LL.D.
Solicitor-General of the United States, Honorary Bencher of Gray's Inn
With a Preface by The Earl of Balfour
"Where there is no vision, the people perish; but he that keepeth theLaw, happy is he."—Proverbs xxix. 18
"Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers haveset."—Proverbs xxii. 28
With whom it is the author's great privilege to collaborate asSolicitor-General in defending and vindicating in the Supreme Court ofthe United States the principles and mandates of its Constitution
Chamonix,
July 14 1922
Preface by the Earl of Balfour[1]
I have been greatly honoured by your invitation to take the chair onthis interesting occasion. It gives me special pleasure to be able tointroduce to this distinguished audience my friend, Mr. Beck,Solicitor-General of the United States. It is a great and responsibleoffice; but long before he held it he was known to the English publicand to English readers as the author who, perhaps more than any otherwriter in our language, contributed a statement of the Allied case inthe Great War which produced effects far beyond the country in which itwas written or the public to which it was first addressed. Mr. Beckapproached that great theme in the spirit of a great judge; hemarshalled his arguments with the skill of a great advocate, and thecombination of these qualities—qualities, highly appreciatedeverywhere, but nowhere more than in this Hall and among a Gray's Innaudience—has given an epoch-making character to his work. To-day hecomes before us in a different character. He is neither judge noradvocate, but historian: and he offers to guide us through one of themost interesting and important enterprises in which our common race hasever been engaged.
The framers of the American Constitution were faced with an entirely newproblem, so far, at all events, as the English-speaking world wasconcerned; and though they founded their doctrines upon the Englishtraditions of law and liberty, they had to deal with circumstances whichnone of their British progenitors had to face, and they showed amasterly spirit in adapting the ideas of which they were the heirs to anew country and new conditions. The result is one of the greatest piecesof constructive statesmanship ever accomplished. We, who belong to theBritish Empire, are at this moment engaged, under very differentcircumstances, in welding slowly and gradually the scattered fragmentsof the British Empire into an organic whole, which must, from the verynature of its geographical situation, have a Constitution as differentfrom that of the British Isles, as the Constitution of the British Islesis different from that of the American States. But all three spring fromone root; all three are carried out by men of like politica