It may well be, as Mr. Commager says, that the American political experience of three and a half centuries has afforded "the most elaborate political laboratory in all history and one whose findings have been pretty well recorded." For thirty years now, roughly since the publication of Mr. Beard's study of the origins of the Constitution, historical investigators in that great laboratory have been reporting findings and releasing odors not always flattering to American democracy and its institutions—often quite unflattering, in fact. Yet it is safe to say that the products of this generation of historians will long be considered monumental.
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