8842. VIRGINIA CONSTITUTION, Revision of.—
Let us [Virginia] provide in
our Constitution for its revision at stated periods.
What these periods should be, nature
herself indicates. By the European tables of
mortality, of the adults living at any one moment
of time, a majority will be dead in about
nineteen years. At the end of that period,
then, a new majority is come into place; or,
in other words, a new generation. Each generation
is as independent of the one preceding,
as that was of all which had gone before.
It has, then, like them, a right to choose for
itself the form of government it believes
most promotive of its own happiness; consequently,
to accommodate to the circumstances
in which it finds itself, that received
from its predecessors; and it is for
the peace and good of mankind, that a solemn
opportunity of doing this every nineteen or
twenty years, should be provided by the constitution;
so that it may be handed on, with
periodical repairs, from generation to generation,
to the end of time, if anything human
can so long endure.—
To Samuel Kerchival. Washington ed. vii, 15.
Ford ed., x, 42.
(M.
1816)
