the decision he was more incensed against the Court than ever. The bold language in which the Chief Justice had defined the Executive power, had set forth the Executive duties, had accused the President of violating a vested legal right, above all, the unusual way in which the decision had been made, could mean nothing else than defiance." "Jefferson justly felt that John Marshall had openly defied him. His friends shared this feeling, and went forward more eagerly than ever in their new attack on the last remnant of Federal power."

To see is to believe; and so Henry Adams, in describing the scene when Marshall administered the oath of office to Jefferson at his first inauguration, brings out the issues between them in the sharpest lines: "In this first appearance of John Marshall as Chief Justice to administer the oath of office lay the dramatic climax of the inauguration. The retiring President, acting for what he supposed to be the best interests of the country, by one of his last acts of power, deliberately intended to perpetuate the principles of his administration, placed at the head of the judiciary, for life, a man as obnoxious to Jefferson as the bitterest New England Calvinist could have been; for he belonged to that class of conservative Virginians whose devotion to Washington, and whose education in the common law, caused them to hold Jef ferson and his theories in antipathy. The new President and his two Secretaries were political philanthropists, bent on restricting the powers of the national government in the interests of human liberty. The Chief Justice, a man who in grasp of mind and steadiness of purpose had no superior, perhaps no equal, was bent on enlarging the powers of government in the interests of justice and nationality. As they stood face to face on this threshold

of their power, each could foresee that the contest between them would end only with life."

But Jeffersonianism, as it came at issue with Marshall, Idied before the close of Jefferson's first administration. Its coffin was made by Jackson in his struggle against Calhoun, and it was buried in the Civil War, while Marshall's work endures to the day of this one hundredth anniversary. Jefferson had both the sword and the purse, while Marshall had neither. Marshall could appeal only to the sober thought of the country, commencing his appeals at a period when the Federal courts were attacked by a fierce and continued tempest, sweeping over the hills and through the valleys with a volume and persistency never since equaled. Nevertheless, McMaster writes of Jefferson's re-election, when the Federalists secured but fourteen electoral votes: "The great mass of the men who, in 1800, voted for Adams, could in 1804 see no reason whatever for voting against Jefferson. Scarcely a Federal institution was missed. Not a Federal principle had been condemned. They saw the debt, the bank, the navy still preserved; they saw a broad construction of the Constitution, a strong government exercising the inherent powers of sovereignty, paying small regard to the rights of States, and growing more and more national day by day, and they gave it a hearty support, as a government administered on the principles for which, ever since the Constitution. was in force, they had contended."

This was the demonstration of an early reaction in favor of the permanent acknowledgment of the constitutional principles maintained by Marshall, whose power and success in perpetuating them we formally recognize to-day. During the century, Europe has been constitutionally revolutionized, and the kaleidoscope of its map

has been completely changed. Old flags have disappeared, and new flags, to some extent, have taken their places. The United States, also, have passed through the throes of one of the greatest civil strifes of modern times; yet the language of the Supreme Court, as uttered through Chief Justice Waite, Mr. Justice Miller, and other Justices who have spoken for it subsequently to all these great convulsions, repeats constantly what was said by Marshall. A comparison carefully made, and stated in a summary manner, between the stability of constitutional principles in the United States during the last century, and their instability elsewhere in the civilized world, leaves a conviction which startles all superficial understandings in reference thereto.

It is said the Constitution has been changed in its essential features by amendments. An amendment is constitutional; and, therefore, we might set up a technical answer to this. But we put it on broader grounds. An amendment to the Constitution in violation of its fundamental principles would be, in every just sense, an essential change; but none of that nature have been made. The earlier amendments were in truth a part of the original Constitution. Then came two relating merely to matters of detail. Afterwards came those which grew out of the Civil War, but which constituted a natural development of the great principles of the Constitution. Take the amendment abolishing slavery! It did little more than recognize an existing condition of things. But we think a fair reading of the history of the constitutional period satisfies that, between the express threat against the slave trade on the ocean at the East and the Ordinance of 1787 on the West, the fathers considered that they had so shut in slavery on the front and on the

rear that, in time, it would die for want of food. The expansion of the slave power which resulted in the war and in the latest constitutional amendments was not in their contemplation; and when, as the consequence thereof, slavery was abolished, the country did not depart from the underlying sentiment of the Constitution, but oscillated back to it. So also those amendments prohibiting the States from jeopardizing the life, liberty and property of our fellow-citizens! These were simply the application to the States of the great civil guaranties which the Constitution originally demanded from the Federal government.

Let us look at the great sanctions in behalf of liberty which we find in the Constitution; the division into three great Departments, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial; the judicial power made independent and placed beyond the control of faction; the veto power; the habeas corpus; the prohibition of ex post facto laws, and of all laws for the deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process; all the provisions against discriminations in favor of States or sections; the protection thrown around those charged with crime; the security of trial by jury; the right to the enjoyment everywhere of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States; these were the great guarantees of the Constitution! We ask you, whether, after the lapse of a century, they do not all shine to-day like the constellations? The builders of our Constitution had not been without practical experience. Almost every State, at the time the Federal Constitutional Convention met, had a written constitution, which had the great guarantees of which we have spoken. But with regard to the relations of the States to the Federal government, they trod a path never blazed. On the

one hand, they came together to make a more perfect Union; on the other, they did not forget that the towns and the individual colonies had been able to meet successfully, first the tyranny of Great Britain, exercised through civil authorities, and, afterwards, her armed forces. The two were at different poles, and were to be counterbalanced. The machinery for this was necessarily experimental. It was not possible that it would not oscillate. But, whenever here we take the great landmarks set by the Supreme Court, whose decisions ultimately control, both directly and by appealing to the hearts and good sense of the people, they stand as they always stood. Chief Justice Waite, speaking in behalf of the Supreme Court in 1876, said:

"The government thus established and defined is to some extent a government of the States in their political capacity. It is also, for certain purposes, a government of the people. Its powers are limited in number, but not in degree. Within the scope of its powers, as enumerated and defined, it is supreme and above the States; but beyond, it has no existence. It was erected for special purposes, and endowed with all the powers necessary for its own preservation and the accomplishment of the ends its people had in view. It can neither grant nor secure to its citizens any right or privilege not expressly or by implication placed under its jurisdiction. The people of the United States resident within any State are subject to two governments: one State, and the other National; but there need be no conflict between the two. The powers which one possesses the other does not. They are established for different purposes and have separate jurisdictions. Together they make one whole, and furnish the people of the United States with a com