tion, and to which those who undertake to prescribe specific rules to themselves, are bound to submit. But when congress are called on to provide new means of executing a granted power, none are "proper," and therefore none are constitutional which operate unequally and unjustly, [ *105 ]*among the States or the people. It is true that perfect and exact equality in this respect is not to be expected; but a near approach to it will always be made, by a wise and fair legislation. Great and obvious injustice and inequality may at all times be avoided. No "means" which involve these consequences can possibly be considered "proper," either in a moral, or in a constitutional sense. It requires no high intellectual faculty to apply this rule; simple integrity is all that is required.
I have not thought it necessary to follow the author through his extended examination of what he terms the incidental powers of congress, arising under the clause of the Constitution we are examining. It would be indeed an endless task to do so; for I am unable to perceive that he proposes any limit to them at all. Indeed, he tells us in so many words, that "upon the whole, the result of the most careful examination of this clause is, that if it does not enlarge, it cannot be construed to restrain the powers of congress, or impair the right of the legislature to exercise its best judgment in the selection of measures to carry into execution the constitutional powers of the national government." This is, indeed, a sweep of authority, boundless and unrestricted. The "best judgment" of congress is the only limit proposed to its powers, whilst there is nothing to control that judgment, nor to correct its errors. Government is abandoned emphatically to its own discretion; for even if a corrective be supposed to exist with the people, that corrective can never be applied in behalf of an oppressed minority. Are the rules which I have proposed indeed nothing? Is no effect whatever to be given to this word "proper," in this clause of the Constitution? Can the author possibly be right in supposing that the Constitution would be the same without it as with it; and that the only object of inserting it was "the desire to remove all possible doubt respecting the right to legislate on that vast mass of incidental powers which must be involved in
