Constitution Day gives cause to reflect as citizens

On Sept. 17, 1787, 42 delegates from 13 colonies met at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to sign the Constitution of the United States. The four-page, handwritten document they signed that day is now considered by many to embody the greatest expression of statesmanship and compromise ever written. When it went into effect, a new nation known as the United States of America officially came into being.

That new nation and its Constitution expressed a movement toward liberty that was in direct contradiction to the long held belief that the common people were fit only to be governed by superior a...