courts. Moreover, judicial interpretation has given a scope to certain clauses of the constitution which no one suspected at the time of their adoption. In the Dartmouth College case in 1819, the Supreme Court held that a charter is a contract, and in a case involving the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1882 the same court interpreted the word "person" to include a corporation. In the former case, the court enlarged the conception of property, and in the latter case, in interpreting an amendment intended for the protection of the negro, the court included under its guardianship the property of artificial as well as of natural persons. The Supreme Court has well been termed "the bulwark of private property." President Hadley aptly remarks:
When it is said, as it commonly is, that the fundamental division of powers in the modern State is into legislative, executive and judicial, the student of American institutions may fairly note an exception. The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters op. the one hand and property owners on the other. The forces of democracy on one side, divided between the executive and the legislature, are set over against the forces of property on the other side, with the judiciary as arbiter between them; the constitution itself not only forbidding the legislature and executive to trench upon the rights of property, but compelling the judiciary to define and uphold those rights in a manner provided by the constitution itself.[1]
These remarks were originally delivered at Berlin University. To the average investor, both at home and abroad, they describe what appears to be an ideal situation. On the other hand, to a democracy seeking to possess more fully the reins of power they indicate a condition that is far from satisfactory.
Slavery
A short time after the election of Washington, a reaction set in against the party of property. The commanding personality of Washington and the high respect in which he was held for a brief period stemmed the reaction but could not avert it. The election of Jefferson marked the triumph of the party of equality, a triumph which the westward drift of population and the successive admission of trans-Allegheny states helped to perpetuate. Kentucky was admitted as a state in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1802, and in the ten years ending with 1821, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine and Missouri joined the family of states, a greater number than in any decade before or since. The Louisiana purchase sealed the fate of the Federalist party. The ideal of equality in the United States is greatly indebted to the circumstances which have made it possible for such large numbers to become the owners of land in their own right. The liberalization of the terms on which the public lands were offered for sale in 1800, and in the years following, contributed powerfully to the growing prevalence of democratic equality. This found expression in the grad-
- ↑ The Independent, Vol. LXIV, 1908, p. 837.
