DATE: Tuesday, September 23, 1997           TAG: 9709230014

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   67 lines

THE CONSTITUTION 210TH ANNNIVERSARY READ OR REREAD THE DOCUMENT

Today marks the end of Constitution Week. We might not have noticed if it hadn't been for Norfolk resident Ellen Beamon. She visited the newspaper to remind us of the annual celebration and to drop off a copy of the proclamation issued by Mayor Paul Fraim.

It is the 210th anniversary of the drafting of the Constitution, and Ms. Beamon thought all Americans ought to pause a moment to commemorate the event. She's right.

Virginians have more reason than most to take pride in the anniversary. It is a Virginian, James Madison, who more than anyone deserves credit for the shape of the document under which we have thrived for two centuries. Rarely have man and moment more perfectly coincided. The country was lucky to have him. Without him, the government created in 1787 would have been far different and might not have endured.

Madison prepared elaborately for the convention that drafted the operating manual for American democracy. He studied governments past and preset. And he brought to the job a healthy distrust of man and power. He thought both needed to be restrained. And the Constitution set out to do that.

Even in the headiest days of the imperial presidency, the chief executive has labored under considerable constraints and has been unable to work his will for long without cooperation from Congress and the consent of the governed.

Congress is often criticized for being too slow, too self-divided, too diffuse to act decisively, but that too is by design. The extent of the mischief it can engage in is restricted by the cumbersome structure of two houses, representing 50 states and multitudinous interests.

The judiciary has lately come under fire for being too free to make law by interpreting law. But there are checks on the judiciary too. And its freedom from political control is a welcome contrast to other societies. There have been few show trials or star chambers here. That too was by design.

The Constitution wasn't all Madison's work, of course. It was a remarkable group of men that gathered in Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787. But fortune favors the prepared mind, and Madison came with a plan and in his quiet, persuasive, logical way bent the will of the majority in his direction again and again.

When it was all over, the one-legged, aristocratic New Yorker, Gouverneur Morris, who sat on the committee of style, summed up the work in the rolling phrases of the Preamble. What the group had achieved was a governmental structure designed to permit Americans ``. . . to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty. . . .''

Despite periodic crises, wars, corruption and scandal, the structure remains intact, the Constitution has worked. We're still here and still at liberty. A fast glance around the world suggests how things could be worse and how much we owe to Madison and his colleagues. And in many of those places on the planet where men live in relative freedom and prosperity, they are living under constitutions modeled on our own.

When the Constitution was complete, a passer by asked a member of the convention what kind of government America was to have. ``A democracy, if you can keep it,'' was the answer. We will only continue to keep it by valuing it properly. And that begins with an effort to learn a little more about the Constitution and to teach our children.

Reading or rereading the document is a good first step. Madison's own daily Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention is one of the great books of America. So is The Federalist, in which Madison, Hamilton and Jay undertook to sell the idea of federal government to their countrymen. And Miracle in Philadelphia is a readable popular history of the convention.

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