The imposing fabric of
political delusion, which has been erected on the basis of this simple
transaction, disappears before the light of historical record.
Could the authors of the Constitution have foreseen the perversion to be
made of their obvious meaning, it might have been prevented by an easy
periphrasis--such as, "We, the people of the States hereby united," or
something to the same effect. The word "people" in 1787, as in 1880,
was, as it is, a collective noun, employed indiscriminately, either as a
unit in such expressions as "this people," "a free people," etc., or in
a distributive sense, as applied to the citizens or inhabitants of one
state or country or a number of states or countries. When the Convention
of the colony of Virginia, in 1774, instructed their delegates to the
Congress that was to meet in Philadelphia, "to obtain a redress of those
grievances, without which _the people of America_ can neither be safe,
free, nor happy," it was certainly not intended to convey the idea that
the people of the American Continent, or even of the British colonies in
America, constituted one political community. Nor did Edmund Burke have
any such meaning when he said, in his celebrated speech in Parliament,
in 1775, "The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen."
We need go no further than to the familiar language of King James's
translation of the Bible for multiplied illustrations of this
indiscriminate use of the term, both in its collective and distributive
senses.
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