John Mars/tall. served to the States when the Union was established. None of his judgments relat ing to the respective powers of the general and State governments have been overruled or materially modified. No one now doubts the wisdom displayed by him. . . . Washington, more than any other man, saved our country from domination by a monarchical government which sought, by force, to take from our fathers the dearest rights of man. Lincoln, more than any other man, saved us from the perils of a divided country, and gave us a restored Union whose flag, wherever it may float, is loved by every true American, from whatever State lie may come, and to whatever school of constitutional construction he may belong. But let us remember that Marshall, more than any other man, saved our Constitution from destruction by those who would have so minimized and fettered the powers of the Xational Government, while magnifying the powers of the States, as to have made the Union not worth preserving. In our respect for the law, and in our love for the Constitu tion and the Union which it ordained, let us take as our model the extraordinary man who this day one hundred years ago became the Chief Justice of the United States and began a judicial career unparalleled in the history of this or any other land. Let us remember that if we will have the same pa tience and gentleness that marked his life, the same love of right and justice that he dis played, and the same unfaltering purpose that he manifested to maintain in all their integrity the institutions ordained by the people of the United States, we will be the better public servants and better citizens.1 When Marshall took his seat on the Su preme Bench he brought with him, not only his legal genius and training and his wide and various experience in politics and diplo macy, but also certain fixed convictions. He was a man who formed opinions slowly, and 1 Honorable J"hn M. Harían, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
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who did not indulge himself in a large col lection of cardinal principles. But the opin ions which he formed and the principles which he adopted, after much hard and silent thought, were immovable; and by them he steered, for they were as constant as the stars. He had one of those rare minds which never confound the passing with the eternal, or mix the accidental and trivial with the things vital and necessary. Hence the com patibility between his absolute fixity of pur pose in certain well ascertained directions, and his wise moderation and large tolerance as to all else. To these qualities was joined another even rarer, the power of knowing what the essential principle really was. In every controversy and in every argument, he went unerringly to the heart of the ques tion, for he had. that, mental quality which Dr. Holmes once compared to the instinct of the tiger for the jugular vein. As he had plucked out the heart of a law case or of a debate in Congress, so he seized on the question which over-rode all others in the politics of the United States, and upon which all else turned. That vital question was whether the United States should be a nation, or a con federacy of jarring and petty republics, des tined to strife, disintegration and decay. . . . These decisions are more than a monu ment of legal reasoning; they embody a masterly exposition of the Constitution; they embody also the well-considered policy of a great statesman. They are the work of a man who saw that the future of the United States hinged on the one question, whether the national should prevail over the sepa ratist principle: whether the nation was to be predominant over the State; whether, in deed, there was to be a nation at all. Through all the issues which rose and fell during these thirty-five years, through all the excitement of the passing day, through Louisiana acquisitions and relations with France and England, through embargoes and war and Missouri compromises and all the bitter, absorbing passions which they
