According to Carl Becker "if the framers of the Constitution could come back to earth and see what the federal government is doing to-day, they would all agree that this monstrous thing was no child of theirs; for to-day the federal government exercises as a matter of course powers which they never dreamed of." This prescient statement rings as true today as it did when Becker wrote An Experiment in Democracy nearly eighty years ago. This American classic is an engaging, gracefully rendered piece of historical literature as well as a non-ideological meditation on the "meaning of...