September 17 was the 215th anniversary of the signing of that most remarkable document, the American Constitution. There wasn't a great deal of fuss made of it. I don't fully understand why. Is there a more important document in existence, one more relevant to our times? It is a document that sits at the foundation, not only of democracy in America, but, in effect, of democracy the world over. It has an overwhelming relevance to the condition of mankind in the 21st Century.

The men who signed the Constitution at the end of the conference in Philadelphia would surely be thunderstruck to learn what significance is attached to their work today. What's that saying? Men make history, but they can never know what history they are making. It is easy at this point to assume that the Constitution was written immediately after the United States won its battle for independence. It wasn't - the country was guided first by the Articles of Confederation, which came into force on March 1, 1781. The Articles were not a success, and the writing of the Constitution was a reaction against their failure, an attempt to correct a pronounced imbalance between state and federal power.

Those who were in at the birth of the young United States were so sick of the long-distance power and arrogance of the British Government that they risked their lives and their fortunes to get free of the British Empire. The odds ran heavily against them, so there is no question that they were brave men. Had the gamble they took in fighting for independence failed, they would almost certainly have been put to death for treason. Historians say that if the British had prosecuted the independence movement with a little more oomph than they did, they'd have destroyed the Continental Army at the start and nipped the rebellion in the bud.

The point is that the American rebels had a huge interest in making their new country succeed. Theirs was a liberation movement - they wanted a clean break not just from English domination, but from the corrupting influence of European ideas about aristocracy and monarchy. They were determined to create a country in which no central authority, removed from the supervision of its citizens, would have the power to discipline or coerce people. As a result, the Articles of Confederation they wrote gave so little power to a federal government, and so much to the 13 States that signed them, that an unworkable situation was the result.

In the aftermath of the revolution, there were many economic problems - prisons overflowed with debtors; farmers were rising up in rebellion because of their difficult situation; relations between the States were terrible; each State imposed its own customs tariffs and had its own currency; trade with the West Indies came to a halt because of British trade restrictions; and the labour force underwent much destructive change.

The British defied the terms of the Paris peace treaty by refusing to get out of the Ohio Valley, and by providing arms and encouragement to the area's Indians to resist American settlement. The Spanish offered the same kind of encouragement to the Choctaw, Creek and Cherokee Indians on the southern frontier. They closed off the Port of New Orleans to American shipping, depriving Kentucky and Tennessee of supplies and access to trade.

Overseas, things weren't much better. The young nation suffered a series of rebuffs and humiliations. None was worse than the capture for ransom of an American cargo ship in the Mediterranean by the Dey of Algiers. Congress couldn't raise the money to get the crew back. When the ruler of Tripoli offered to insure safe passage for all American vessels, for a price, Congress couldn't raise that money, either, and it looked as if the lucrative new trade route in the Mediterranean might have to be abandoned, as a result. The federal treasury was empty, and a depressed, dispirited Congress had no way of filling it.

The odd thing was that although all Americans could see clearly that the country was in trouble, they still had very little appetite for fixing it. When Congress proposed the Philadelphia convention, many of the states were very reluctant to take part. In the end, all but Rhode Island sent delegates. Most of them were talented, experienced legislators. Many of them were dead set against weakening the authority of the states. But there was also a group of people who recognised that if the problems were to be solved, a strong federal government was the only way of doing it. James Madison was one of them, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin were among others. The president of the convention, General George Washington, hero of the revolution, agreed with them. Alexander Hamilton, who led the delegation from New York, was another who favoured a strong national government, but his enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that his two fellow delegates strongly opposed any major amendments to the Confederation. The three of them annoyed each other to such an extent that the two who opposed change left in disgust before the convention ended, leaving Mr. Hamilton to become the only signatory from New York.

Many of those who attended the convention were lawyers, which accounts for their taste for detail. They were all well-educated men . something that had rather a different meaning in those days than now. Freshmen at Harvard in those days, for example, studied Cicero, Virgil, the Greek Testament and Hebrew. Later, they would study geography, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, physics, logic, rhetoric, history and natural philosophy. Harvard said it aimed to instruct its students in "ye Learned Languages, ye Liberal Arts and Sciences". If that was the kind of education these men enjoyed, it was no wonder the language of the Constitution had such a noble, soaring character.

But at the Philadelphia convention, they were deeply divided about how they should proceed, or even whether they should proceed. Two rules were adopted by the delegates to the convention that helped nudge them towards a solution. First, its proceedings were held in complete secrecy. None of the delegates was allowed to make a copy of any entry in the convention journal being kept by the secretary without the express permission of the president, the journal could be read only by the delegates and no one was permitted to publish anything said or written in the convention. To justify this secrecy at the time, delegates talked about the need to protect themselves from spying by other nations, or the effect their discussions might have on an already dispirited nation.

But the true reason was the fear delegates had that their own reputations would be damaged by disclosure. Many of them knew they would have to betray the wishes of the states they represented on occasion. Without honest discussion, there could be no solution to the country's problems. Without secrecy, there could be no honest discussion. As a result, surprising things happened. Men known for their conservative views expressed their support, for example, for an elected chief executive. Men known for their abiding faith in the good sense of ordinary citizens demanded the chief executive be appointed by the Senate. Honesty flourished.

The second rule that nudged the convention towards finding solutions was that delegates deliberated as a committee of the whole, and reported their decisions to themselves as a convention. This certainly meant for a long-winded, circular process, but it also meant that infinite care was taken, and it meant that someone who regretted a decision taken in committee would have a second chance to fight it, and that those who were dissatisfied with the eloquence with which they expressed an opinion would have a second chance.

As a result, delegates were able to deal with the really difficult problems - the interests of large states as opposed to small states, for example, the issue of slavery and the all-important balance of federal and state power. The issue of sovereignty they were able to dodge by saying that power resided, not with the federal government or the state governments, but with "the people", a phrase that really, none of them would have been able to define at that early stage in the development of the nation. They accomplished all this in such a way that all sides were able to believe they had got the better of their opponents.

Luck, accident and serendipity played as big a part as good judgment and good sense, perhaps, but the result was a gift to posterity of enormous importance. It should be remembered, and celebrated, better.

@EDITRULE:

To end on rather a different subject, my colleague in the comment business, Ross Eldridge, wondered recently whether I might devote a column to DH Lawrence. He's a highly regarded author - Cyril Connolly includes, as I remember it, three of Lawrence's books on his list of the 100 key works of the Modern Movement. My difficulty is that I started Sons and Lovers when I was in my teens, didn't like it and never tried Lawrence again. I promise to do better from now on, but in the meantime, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one hanging on to every word if Mr. Eldridge himself were to write about Lawrence.

And Mr. Bill Cook wrote the Editor to say he hoped that if I did write such a column, I would write it "with more equanimity and balance" than I have given to the Middle East crises. I don't claim any kind of infallibility at all, but it does seem to me that if one uses one's head, the facts and even a rudimentary grasp of the principles involved point pretty clearly in one direction. If one uses one's heart. well, I seem to recall someone writing a book or an article recently called `The Heart is Always on the Left'.

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