Excerpt from The Law of the Federal and State Constitutions of the United States, With an Historical Study of Their Principles

American constitutional law has had its broadest development in the last twenty years. Since the cardinal meaning of the Federal Constitution was settled by the early great decisions, and the relation of the States to the Federal Government once decided by the Civil War, there has, in a century, been comparatively little growth until the last decade or two. The enormous mass of litigation on the meaning of the "obligation of contract" and of the words "commerce among the States" related, after all, to but two short phrases in that great document, and in the latter of these two instances the decisions of the last twenty years far exceed, both in number and importance, all that went before. Constitutional law, therefore, like the law of labor and free contract, is in the United States "a live science." Both in the States and in the nation it has had its most active discussion recently, and the matter bids fair to increase still more at the hands of the next generation. The great social principles, of the right of the individual, both to property and even to personal liberty, as against the will of a majority or an organized minority having the ears of the executive and the legislative branches of government, have got to be resettled - the great political questions of the social and jurisdictional (not political) relation of the States to the Federal Government, the right of the States to their own customary law and their own police power, have, it seems, once more to be fought over. No apology, therefore, is offered for presenting this work at this time. It is prepared primarily for the authors use in his classes at Harvard University, not, therefore, in the first instance, for a practising lawyer, rather for the citizen and the student of politics. Moreover, considerations of space and otherwise have made it advisable to duplicate no work that has been done before.

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