The Ark of America

(8 of 8)

The Constitution is endlessly unfinished business. The founders worried intensely about protecting property. Americans now worry intensely about protecting individual rights. The morale of the tribe must be considered, along with the rights of the individual and the appetites of the lawyer. In many ways, the U.S. is a hopelessly overlawyered society, the air thick with litigating birds of prey.

One of the Federalist papers, in a grandiose moment, predicted that the Constitution would "vindicate the honor of the human race." What the founders created, at any rate, was an extraordinary civilizing program, and a moral style in which conscience -- the Judiciary, the third eye -- was turned into an institution. The genius of the Constitution has been the moral restlessness it embodies, and its capacity to change even while its basic structure abides. Today, all but six of the world's nations either have or are committed to having a single-document constitution. That idea was born in Philadelphia. Reverence is due to those men in the hot summer of the Enlightenment. They changed the world.