Page:James Bryce American Commonwealth vol 1.djvu/410

388 which ensues, right is too often lost sight of or treated as if it were synonymous with might. It is taken for granted that what the Constitution permits it also approves, and that measures which are legal cannot be contrary to morals."

The interpretation of the Constitution has at times become so momentous as to furnish a basis for the formation of political parties; and the existence of parties divided upon such questions has of course stimulated the interest with which points of legal interpretation have been watched and canvassed. Soon after the formation of the National government in 1789 two parties grew up, one advocating a strong central authority, the other championing the rights of the States. Of these parties the former naturally came to insist on a liberal, an expansive, perhaps a lax construction of the words of the Constitution, because the more wide is the meaning placed upon its grant of powers, so much the wider are those powers themselves. The latter party, on the other hand, was acting in protection both of the States and of the individual citizen against the central government, when it limited by a strict and narrow interpretation of the fundamental instrument the powers which that instrument conveyed. The distinction which began in those early days has never since vanished. There has always been a party professing itself disposed to favour the central government, and therefore a party of broad construction. There has always been a party claiming that it aimed at protecting the rights of the States, and therefore a party of strict construction. Some writers have gone so far as to deem these different views of interpretation to be the foundation of all the political parties that have divided America. This view, however, inverts the facts. It is not because men have differed in their reading of the Constitution that they have advocated or opposed an extension of Federal powers; it is their attitude on this substantial issue that has determined their attitude on the verbal one. Moreover, the two great parties have several times changed sides on the very question of interpretation. The purchase of Louisiana and the Embargo acts were the work of the Strict Constructionists, while it was the Loose Constructionist party which protested against the latter measure, and which, at the Hartford Convention of 1814, advanced doctrines of State rights almost amounting to those