ment, and, therefore Marshall had favored a convention of the States to ordain a new instrument of union, and supported, with zeal and ardor, the Constitution proposed for ratification by the States.

In the Virginia convention, Marshall's directness and cogent reasoning upon the power granted to Congress to lay taxes for the support of the government; the power given to the President to call out the militia, and the judicial power conferred on the Federal Government, forced him to the front rank as a great logician and statesman of consummate wisdom and ability. "The country was divided into two great political parties; the one of which contemplated America as a Nation, and labored incessantly to invest the Federal head with powers competent to the preservation of the Union. The other attached itself to the State governments; viewed all the powers of Congress with jealousy, and assented reluct antly to measures which would enable the head to act in any respect independently of the members."

The latter party believed that there were no evils which could befall the Federal Government comparable to ills which would follow the surrender of State independence to Federal sovereignty.

Marshall combated these views with all the ardor of a sincere patriotism by the side of Washington, Madison and Edmund Randolph in the convention of Virginia, by which the Constitution was to be ratified or rejected. It passed the trying ordeal by the small majority of ten votes. For the part he took in that memorable contest it has been said: "That he unconsciously prepared for his own glory the imperishable connection which his name now has with its principles."

He maintained that the system of government devised

by the Constitution was that of a well-regulated democracy, whose maxims, he claimed, were a strict observance of justice and public faith and a steady adherence to virtue. These, he asserted, are the principles of a good government. Down to 1792 he was in and out of the General Assembly of Virginia, while engaged in the most arduous labors of an increased professional practice, but all the while defending the administration of Washington and supporting the same political principles he had avowed from the first.

When the war between France and England, in 1793, was calculated to bring our country into its entanglements, Washington issued his proclamation of neutrality, which inflamed to a high degree the sympathizers with France, and public meetings were called to denounce the action, when Marshall boldly advocated the conduct of the President, as fulfilling absolutely his constitutional duty, and an act designed to keep our people at peace. His support of the Jay treaty and the right of the President to conclude a commercial treaty with a foreign nation was another manifestation of his marked ability as a constitutional lawyer and statesman. His answer to the charge that the President had been guilty of a violation of the power given to Congress "to regulate commerce" bears all the impress of a judicial opinion, more, even, than the argument of a statesman. Such was the feeling in Virginia against the Jay treaty with Great Britain, that, although he was warned of the danger to his popularity, yet he did not hesitate to join the unpopular side of the question.

At the instance of Washington he became a candidate for Congress, and was elected, in spite of very serious opposition. He took his seat at December session, 1799,

and met the most formidable debaters. It is probable that the House has never held within its walls their equals. In spite of this, he was a leader in all the discussions upon international and constitutional law, and was facile princeps in the logical and forceful handling of every topic which bore upon these questions. His masterful argument on the first case of extradition of an alleged criminal under international law, recognized by treaty, gave evidence of inexhaustible learning upon that subject, then a new one to the young republic. In the Nash or Robbins case he maintained in an unanswerable argument that the case came distinctly under the Jay treaty; that it constituted a question exclusively for the execu tive and not for judicial decision; and that in deciding it the President was not chargeable with an interference with judicial functions. It was a masterpiece of convincing reasoning and constitutional argument.

He had the manliness to separate from his political friends when they were wrong, as firmly as he supported them when they were right. When the second section of the Sedition Act was under discussion in Congress, Marshall showed his absolute independence by separating from his party, and, while not challenging the constitutionality of the Act, he voted for its repeal on the ground that it was inexpedient and unsuited to the temper of the American people.

In 1800, when he became Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President John Adams, his dispatches manifested the highest order of diplomatic discussion and gave entire satisfaction to the country that his qualifications for that post had not been overrated.

The friendship which had before existed between Marshall and Adams was now to be broadened into a tie

of far more importance than the intimacy of personal association; for, from that time forth, these names were to be linked together in the constitutional and juridical history of the country. It was well known that Marshall had little ambition for political preferment; on the contrary, he had a repugnance to a political career. He had entered politics largely against his will and only from a sense of patriotic duty.

Marshall had naturally a legal mind, and at the time he came to the bar he was not confronted with a deluge of discordant decisions nor with the many questions of commercial law which has advanced in the past century into a department of the law itself. He had to lay the foundation of his legal learning deep in the common law, which came to us from the mother country, and with the text-books of that day, and the decisions from Westminster Hall, he acquired a vast amount of technical learning, which it is difficult to acquire from case study of the present time. His arguments at the bar evinced the depth of his technical knowledge as well as the strength of his wisdom.

In November, 1800, Chief Justice Ellsworth, then in Europe, resigned, and, it is said, that the President meeting Marshall, who had suggested some name for the office, replied "that he intended to appoint a plain Virginia lawyer named John Marshall." It fairly took Marshall's breath away. He was but forty-five years of age when he rose to the high place of "Chief Justice of the United States." Mr. Pinkney said of him: "That he was born to be the Chief Justice of any country in which he lived," and indeed it seemed as if the judicial ermine had fallen on his shoulders by natural inheritance.

This tribunal, in the trial of great national causes, was

to be the field in which he would display that high order of statesmanship which was to strengthen the arm of the Federal Government, and give his patriotic heart ample scope for perfecting that Union he so dearly loved. It was a tribunal in which conflicting sovereign claims would pass in peaceful judicial review, whose decree would be a "pledge of the immortality of the Union, of the perpetuity of national strength and glory, increasing and brightening with age, of concord at home and reputation abroad." He was even more the judge than the advocate. He had none of the arts of the rhetorician. His ability to deal with great legal problems was a selfevident fact, and the simplicity with which he disposed of them was more powerful than if his opinions were clothed in the most ornate diction of the orator. Such was the constitution of his mind and his early education that he was able to draw arguments a priori from “the spirit of the laws and from the natural foundations of justice."

While it is as a judge that his services to his country chiefly won their gratitude, yet his judicial labors were so constantly devoted to expounding the Constitution in the "constructive period" that his character, as jurist and statesman, are inseparably blended. It was his good fortune and a blessing to his country that during his service on the Supreme Bench so many important constitutional questions were forever settled.

He was a man who believed that public office was a public trust, and amid all the rancor of party politics, in those early days of strife, the breath of slander never cast a stain upon his spotless reputation. It has been said that in him virtue seemed to have its visible representative. It was in that great tribunal the meditative,