Nick’s Reviews > We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution > Status Update

Only in the United States, Wilson said, were the People trusted to write and ratify their own constitutions—and to improve them. "A progressive state is necessary to the happiness and perfection of Man," he said, to roars of applause. "Let us, with fervent zeal, press forward, and make unceasing advances in everything that can support, improve, refine, or embellish Society."

"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind," and constitutions need amending as "new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances."' This was not a quirk of Jefferson's eccentric mind; it was a principle upon which the United States was founded, an idea embraced by an entire generation.

Amendment is necessary because everything decays, even laws. As the English jurist Matthew Hale put it in 1697, "As all sublunary things are subject to corruption and putrefaction, to diseases and rust, so even laws themselves, by long tract of time gather certain diseases and excrescences, certain abuses and corruptions grow into the law.

"The Constitution of a country is not the paper or parchment upon which the compact is written," John Quincy Adams agreed. "It is the system of fundamental laws, by which the people have consented to be governed, which is always supposed to be impressed upon the mind of every individual, and of which the written and printed copies are nothing more than the evidence."