The Meaning of Constitutional Government
5
out the restraint of law and order, freedom cannot exist. Justice means the
securing to persons of the things that rightfully belong to them, and the
rewarding of persons according to what they have earned or deserve.
Equality of opportunity and equality before the law are normally regarded as attributes of justice in a free society, as distinguished from
equality of result or condition, which must be imposed by coercion.
To understand liberty, order, and justice, think of their opposites: slavery, disorder, and injustice. The aim of a good constitution is to enable a
society to have a high degree of liberty, order, and justice. No country has
ever attained perfect freedom, order, and justice for everyone, and presumably no country ever will. This is because human beings and human
societies are both very imperfect. The Framers of the Constitution of the
United States did not expect to achieve perfection of either human nature
or government. What they did expect was ‘‘to form a more perfect
union’’ and to surpass the other nations of their era, and of earlier eras,
in establishing a good political order.
Over the centuries, constitutions have come into existence in a variety
of ways. They have been decreed by a king; they have been proclaimed
by conquerors and tyrants; they have been given to a people by religious
prophets such as Moses, who gave the Ten Commandments and laws to
the Israelites; they have been designed by a single wise man such as Solon, who gave a new constitution to the people of Athens in ancient
Greece six centuries before Christ. Other constitutions have grown out of
the decisions of judges and popular custom, such as the English ‘‘common law.’’ Or, constitutions can be agreed upon by a gathering called a
convention. The constitutions that have been accepted willingly by the
large majority of a people have generally been the constitutions which
have endured the longest.
But because people are restless and quarrelsome, few constitutions
have lasted for very long. Nearly all of those that were adopted in Europe
after the First World War had collapsed by the end of the Second World
War a quarter of a century later; many of the newer constitutions proclaimed in Europe, Asia, and Africa not long after the Second World War
ended in 1945 have already have been tossed aside or else do not really
function anymore. There are today more than one hundred national constitutions in force throughout the world. Nearly all of them were written