Our Changing Constitution

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: persons.") Another was the provision that direct taxes should be apportioned among the states according to population. With all its compromises, however, the Constitution embodied a great governmental principle, full of hope for the future of the country, and the state conventions to which it was submitted for ratification were wise enough to accept what was offered. Ratification by certain of the states was facilitated by the publication of that remarkable series of papers afterward known as the "Federalist." These were the work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, and first appeared in New York newspapers. One of the objections to the new Constitution in the minds of many people was the absence of a "bill of rights" containing those provisions for the protection of individual liberty and property (e. g., trial by jury, freedom of speech, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures) which had come down from the early charters of English liberties. In deference to this sentiment a series of ten brief amendments were proposed and speedily ratified. Another amendment (No. XI) was soon afterward adopted for the purpose of doing away with the effect of a Supreme Court decision. Thereafter.save for a change in the manner of electing the President and Vice-president, the Constitution was not again amended until after the close of the Civil War, when Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV, having for their primary object the protection of the newly enfranchised Negroes, were adopted. The Constitution was not again amended until the last decade, when the Income Tax Amendment, the amendment providing for the election of Senators by popular vote, the Prohibition Amendment, and the Woman Suffrage Amendment were adopted in rapid succession. Some of these will be discussed in la...
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