Excerpt from Some Defects in the Constitution of the United States: An Address to the Law Department of the University of Pennsylvania, 27 April, 1906 Our F ederal Constitution was adopted nearly a century and a quar ter ago. In that time every State has radically revised its constitution and most of them several times. Indeed, the constitution of New York requires that the question of a constitutional convention shall be submitted to its people at least once every 20 years. The object is that the organic law shall keep abreast of the needs and wants of the people and shall represent the will and progress of to-day and shall not, as is the case with the F ederal Constitution, be hampered by provisions deemed best by the divided counsels of a small handful of men in providing for the wants of the Government considerably more than 100 years ago. Had those men been gifted with divine foresight and created a Constitution fit for this day and its develop ment, it would have been unsuited for the needs of the times in which it was fashioned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.