partaient; a supremacy which has never since been challenged; and which it is difficult for us now to conceive ever to have been chal lenged. Soon after he pronounced void an act of a State Legislature which was in vio lation of the Constitution of the United States. Then men -began to appreciate the fact that the Federal power was supreme, and that under the interpretation of John Marshall the Constitution did not provide a mere rope of sand for the States, but was the strong title which bound them together into a nation. From these sound beginnings he pro ceeded with unfaltering steps literally build ing up a nation upon the foundation of the Constitution. His views did not at first, nor even during his life, meet with universal acquiescence. During the whole of the two generations of his judicial service he was the subject of bitter criticism, and more than once there was almost open revolt. He him self at times became disheartened, and in a letter to his associate, Joseph Story, in 1832, he said: "I yield slowly and reluctantly to the convictioa that our Constitution cannot last." This was but three years before his death, and it may well be that his last hours were clouded with doubts of the future of his country. But he had builded more wisely and surely than he knew. His interpreta tion of the spirit of the Constitution, besides having the weight of authority, came event ually to be accepted as well for the truth of its resistless logic. He was not merely a great and learned Judge. There have been others. His title to the eternal gratitude of his countrymen is found in the fact that he was the creator of constitutional govern ment, as we now understand that term. The result of his work is the grandeur of the imperial flag under which we live.1
the meaning and the scope of the Constitu tion, and so to interpret that instrument as not to cripple the powers conferred upon the government of the Union, and yet to recognize the just powers of the States '. in respect of all matters not committed by the people to the general government. Heated partisans at the outset charged that ! the court, under the guidance and domina, tion of Marshall, desired to destroy the pow- . crs of the States and to enlarge the powers of the Union beyond anything ever contem plated by the fathers. Marshall understood the motive of those attacks. He believed, and so wrote to Mr. Justice Story, that there was a deep design to convert the national government into a mere league of States, not emanating from the people. Said he: "The attack upon the judiciary is, in fact, an attack upon the Union. The judicial de partment is well understood to be that through which the government may be at tacked most successfully, because it is with out patronage, and, of course, without power. And it is equally well understood that every subtraction from its jurisdiction is a vital wound to the government itself. The attack upon it, therefore, is a masked battery aimed at the government itself." But, unmoved by the clamor of political leaders, and having no purpose except to interpret the Constitution so as not to de feat the objects for which the Union was ordained, the Court held steadily to the line of duty, and in the great judgments of Mar shall laid the foundations upon which our constitutional system rests. In one of those judgments he declared that "in America, the powers of sovereignty are divided between the government of the Union, and those ot the States. They are each sovereign with respect to the objects committed to it, and neither sovereign with respect to the objects The great problem before the Supreme committed to the other." He rejected the Court during Marshall's administration of theory of construction that would have pros the office of Chief Justice, was to declare trated the Union at the feet of the States, 11 lonorable Hosea M. Knowlton, Attorney-General of and equally the theory that would have taken no account of the rights which had been re Massachusetts.
