That difference is what makes our Constitution, and the intent of our Founders, so amazing and unique in world history. And that is what makes the written text’sits modern disregard so dangerous to the future of democratic, constitutional self-government. If the American constitutional system is not respected and honored by the polity and the judiciary, it is back to the past, not forward to the future.

Wasn’t that about when a twenty year long global ideological war was about to start, thus reducing the number of people on the Earth and increasing the number beneath it?

So did Thomas Jefferson. He wrote to James Madison on September 6 1789: “it may be proved, that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation: they may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters, too, of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors are extinguished then, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being, till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of thirty-four years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” He goes on to argue that a right of amendment or repeal is not a satisfactory equivalent.

In that year of 1789, the theory that political power comes from those over whom it is exercised, and depends upon their will; that every authority not so constituted is illegitimate and precarious; that the past is more a warning than an example; that the earth belongs to those who are on it, not under it was obviously current on both sides of the Atlantic