The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has
no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between
man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a
contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to
be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago.
[This essay was written in 1869.] And it can be supposed to have
been a contract then only between persons who had already come
to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable
and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically,
that only a small portion even of the people then existing were
consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express
either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those
persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all
dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or
seventy years. and the constitution, so far as it was their
contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to
make it obligatory upon