his fame. Indeed, he himself, in after years, is understood to have admitted as much. The first volume, containing the introduction and giving a résumé of the history of the various colonies preceding the Revolutionary war, is a model. How much of the volumes themselves were the actual work of Marshall I do not know. The title page, written by one who knew the use of exact and accurate language, says that it is "compiled under the inspection of the Hon. Bushrod Washington from original papers to which is prefixed an introduction

by John Marshall." Whether the compiling was done by Marshall and the work by Washington, or the compilation was by Washington and the work by Marshall, it is difficult to say. The book itself does not bear internal evidence of the clearness and succinctness that appear in his judicial opinions, and how it was possible for a lawyer, between the death of Washington and the publication of the volumes, in the active practice of his profession, and doing so faithfully and well the work in the first few years on the bench, in a position novel to him, deciding questions that covered almost the entire range of human knowledge, to give to this work the time. necessary to do justice to himself and his great subject, is difficult of comprehension. One thing, however, is true, and that is that the insight which such labor imposed and conferred, into the great motives and great deeds of him who was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," give a color and tinge to the banks through which the streams of judicial decisions were thereafter to flow that can hardly be sufficiently appreciated, and broadened and deepened the view of the great brain upon which this Nation, its jurisprudence and its Constitution were built.

As a member of the State legislature and of the executive council there was brought to his mind, and he was compelled to study and consider, the wants, the aspirations, the objections and necessities of his native State and its relations with the General Government, which, supplemented by his service in the halls of Congress, where he was bound to know the necessities of the Nation and its comparative rights and requirements as against the State, placed him in a position in which he could accurately and clearly define the rights of the one without overlooking the powers of the other.

As a diplomat, while no treaty is written upon the statute books as a tribute to his achievement, his embarrassed attitude in connection with the French government, cooling his heels in antechambers, coming in contact with and sought to be played upon by the master liar of the age, Talleyrand; seeing the excesses, the vices, the weaknesses and tyrannies of French liberty, to a thoughtful, reflective and judicial mind furnished that knowledge that, viewing it from afar, could never have given to him and enriched his mind with a knowledge of the danger that might lie to a republic in the failure to discriminate between liberty and license, or in the worship of liberty gone mad.

As member of the Cabinet, with a personal knowledge of the close and intimate relations between the President and his official family, and hence of the comparative rights, duties and obligations of the executive and legislative departments of the government, the knowledge which had theretofore been abstract became concrete, and the statesman was, by his experience, fitted to become the judge and arbiter between the great departments of the government.

While, considered in each of these respective positions, Marshall was great and would have left his imprint upon the times, still, had his life ceased on the 31st of January, 1801, it is doubtful whether he would have been regarded as playing an important part in the history of his country All of these were simply preparatory to the great field which was opened before him - the field of construction, definition and application of laws to rights, public and private; it was the great school in and through which he graduated into the higher seat upon the bench. They were the springs, the rivulets, the streams, the rivers, rising in the rocks of war, flowing through the meadows of peace, past the hamlets and cities of legislative experience, over the shoals and sands of controversy, until they emptied into the great ocean from which he drew his inspiration for his work upon the bench. Of all these positions, although they were filled well and honorably, it might truthfully be said, as was said of the French warrior who, after retiring from the profession of arms, devoted himself to the cultivation of and produced a new thing of beauty:

"Who is there now knows aught of his story?

What is left of him but a name?

Of him who shared in Napoleon's glory,

And dreamed that his sword had won him his fame!

Ah! the fate of a man is past discovering,

Little did Jacqueminot suppose,

At Austerlitz or Moscow's burning,

That his fame would rest in the heart of a rose!"

And Marshall's fame rests, and must rest, with a halo that will surround his name through all coming generations, so long as this Nation and this Constitution shall last, upon his decisions as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, that fastened upon this peo

ple for all time that great instrument, of which Mr. Gladstone said: "As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most perfect work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."

In a sense, the judicial department is the weakest of the three into which American government is divided. It has neither the purse nor the sword. It has no appointing power, no patronage of office, and yet in a broader and truer sense it can be well said to hold its own with either of the other two.

"I knew a very wise man," said Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, "that believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." And, in a sense, it is true that a court of last resort can say: "Give us the power to con strue, to define, to overturn the acts of the legislative body of the Nation, and it need not concern us very much what acts they pass." A law of Congress or General Assembly means what the court construing it says it means; neither more nor less. If the court say it is valid, it is valid. If the court say it is void, it isn't worth the waste paper that it is written upon. And in all legislative experience courts are to be reckoned with, for their say is the last.

The Constitution was created by the great convention that met in Philadelphia and sat behind closed doors in 1787-88. The fifty-five men from the twelve States (Rhode Island refusing to participate), and there were giants in those days - Randolph, Washington, Mason, Wythe, Madison, Ellsworth, Sherman, Gerry, Livingston, Hamilton, Dickinson, the Martins, Pinckney, the

Morrises, Wilson and Franklin - constituted a galaxy of brains, talent, patriotism and creative capacity that has never been surpassed in the history of the world, if it has been equaled. Jay, Hamilton and Madison, in the Federalist, construed and supported it. Webster, Wirt, Dexter, Pinkney and Hopkinson argued it in the courts. Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Clay and that wonderful coterie of distinguished statesmen that adorned the halls of Congress when the century was yet young, debated, discussed and legislated concerning it; but, after all, it was John Marshall, more than any man that ever lived, that made it; that is, told what it meant.

The Constitution of the United States, notwithstanding all the claims as to how it marches on, and that this government is institutional rather than constitutional, as it left the pen and decree of John Marshall is substantially the constitution of this, the beginning of the twentieth century. The first ten amendments, in the nature of a bill of rights, were adopted before he assumed the bench, and so nearly after the adoption of the Constitution itself that they can fairly be said to be parts of the original Constitution. The eleventh amendment was proposed as the result of the decision of Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dallas, 419, and ratified by January, 1798. The twelfth amendment, providing for the election of President and Vice-President, was proposed within three years after his accession to the bench and ratified inside of four years. No amendment was thereafter sought to be made until the conclusion of the war of the rebellion, when the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were ratified between December, 1865, and March, 1870. Of these the thirteenth, abolishing slavery, was simply writing in words what had been theretofore written in bayo