Book Description

Excerpt from The American Plan of Government: The Constitution of the United States as Interpreted by Accepted Authorities There come crises to all nations - times when actions taken or policies adopted will vitally affect the lives of future generations. At such times men are forced to think - to go back to fundamentals - to reexamine the foundations of their institutions. For the United States this second decade of the twentieth century is a period of crisis. The United States Constitution of 1916 is not the Constitution of 1789. Outwardly, indeed, save for seventeen chronologically appended amendments, it is identical. But in its meaning, in its breadth of application, its power of adaptability to the ever increasing complexity of our national life, it is very different. A set of rules gains in meaning and in usefulness by being put into practice. A statute gains its fullest legal value only when the history of its enactment is known and there has grown up around it a body of precedent arising out of cases involving its use and out of decisions rendered under its provisions and reflecting somewhat of the personality of the men rendering those decisions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.