The Lamp of Experience
13
sons of history and were strongly influenced by historical, legal, and
constitutional precedents, both foreign and domestic. They had read a
good deal of law and history. They knew something of political philosophy, that great body of learning that seeks to know and understand the
first principles of government, and what it takes to establish good government and promote the common good or ‘‘general welfare.’’
But they were not alienated closet-philosophers trying to found a perfect society or utopian paradise, for they were keenly aware of man’s imperfections as well as his strengths. Almost to a man, the Framers were
aware of the intricate process by which human beings had learned to live
together, at least in some places and at certain times, in freedom, order,
and justice. Those who forget the mistakes of the past, it has been said,
are bound to repeat them. The Framers knew of the many mistakes that
had been made in the governing of great nations. Above all, they knew
the benefits enjoyed in a society in which the claims of authority and the
claims of freedom were maintained in a healthy balance. ‘‘Power corrupts,’’ said Lord Acton, the nineteenth-century British political thinker,
‘‘and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’’ The men who wrote the American Constitution would have agreed, but they would have also added:
‘‘Yes, but absolute liberty can also corrupt a nation. There is no freedom in
anarchy.’’
‘‘I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided,’’ the fiery patriot
leader Patrick Henry told his fellow planters of Virginia in 1775, ‘‘and
that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but
by the past.’’ The confidence and trust expressed by American political
leaders in the political principles they applied in making the Constitution and evaluating its merits stemmed not from rootless theories and
ideals divorced from experience and reality, but from the conviction that
these principles were tried and true—the result of trial and error spanning centuries of political conflict. This was true of both Patrick Henry,
the Anti-Federalist leader who opposed the Constitution, and Alexander
Hamilton, the Federalist leader who favored it. What divided these gentlemen in 1787, as we shall later learn, was not so much a disagreement
over first principles as a difference of opinion over whether those principles had been given proper weight and correctly adapted to the American situation.