The People as Constituent Power 171
since the rebellion against King George, and four years since the British army had
left Massachusetts; doubtless many people wished to be bothered no longer. The
action of the people as constituent power is, after all, a legal concept, or even a
necessary legal fiction where the sovereignty of any concrete person or government
is denied. It does not signify that everyone is actually engrossed in the fabrication
of constitutions. On the other hand, it does not seem necessary to believe that the
convention, when it declared the constitution ratified, put something over on an
innocent or apathetic or reluctant people. The people of Massachusetts had re-
jected the constitution proposed in 1778. They could have rejected the one pro-
posed in 1780. It was adopted, not because it was thought perfect or final by every-
one, but because it offered a frame of government, or basis of agreement, within
which people could still lawfully disagree. It has lasted, with many amendments,
until the present day.
A Word on the Constitution of the United States
The idea that sovereignty lay with the people, and not with states or their govern-
ments, made possible in America a new kind of federal structure unknown in Eu-
rope. The Dutch and Swiss federations were unions of component parts, close per-
manent alliances between disparate corporate members. For them no other
structure was possible, because there was as yet no Dutch or Swiss people except in
a cultural sense. It was in the Dutch revolution of 1795 and the Swiss revolution of
1798 that these two bundles of provinces or cantons were first proclaimed as po-
litical nations. In America it was easier to make the transition from a league of
states, set up during the Revolution, to a more integral union set up in the United
States constitution of 1787. The new idea was that, instead of the central govern-
ment drawing its powers from the states, both central and state governments
should draw their powers from the same source; the question was the limit be-
tween these two sets of derived powers. The citizen, contrariwise, was simultane-
ously a citizen both of the United States and of his own state. He was the sover-
eign, not they. He chose to live under two constitutions, two sets of laws, two sets
of courts and officials; theoretically, he had created them all, reserving to himself,
under each set, certain liberties specified in declarations of rights.
It has been widely believed, since the publication in 1913 of Charles A. Beard’s
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, that the federal constitution of 1787
marked a reaction against democratic impulses of the Revolution, and was a device
by which men of property, particularly those holding securities of the state or con-
tinental governments, sought to protect themselves and their financial holdings
vote at all (1,801,918 “ayes” to 11,610 “no’s” with some 4,300,000 abstentions). It is a question whether
a vote by 23 per cent of the population should be considered “light.” This percentage may have been a
good measure of the politically interested population; in the annual elections of the governor the ratio
of persons actually casting a vote to the total of adult white males ranged between 9 per cent and 28
per cent until it began to rise with the election of 1800. See J. R. Pole, “Suffrage and Representation
in Massachusetts: A Statistical Note,” in William and Mary Quarterly, XIV (October 1957), 590–92,
and J. Godechot, Les institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l ’Empire (Paris, 1951), 252.