he currency; a bank is of appropriate use in the exercise
of these enumerated powers; and therefore, though not absolutely
necessary, a bank is entirely proper and constitutional. "With respect
to the means by which the powers that the Constitution confers are to be
carried into execution," he said, Congress must be allowed the
discretion which "will enable that body to perform the high duties
assigned to it, in the manner most beneficial to the people." In short,
the Constitution of the United States is not a strait jacket but a
flexible instrument vesting in Congress the powers necessary to meet
national problems as they arise. In delivering this opinion Marshall
used language almost identical with that employed by Lincoln when,
standing on the battle field of a war waged to preserve the nation, he
said that "a government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall not perish from the earth."

SUMMARY OF THE UNION AND NATIONAL POLITICS

During the strenuous period between the establishment of American
independence and the advent of Jacksonian democracy the great American
experiment was under the direction of the men who had launched it. All
the Presidents in that period, except John Quincy Adams, had taken part
in the Revolution. James Madison, the chief author of the Constitution,
lived until 1836. This age, therefore, was the "age of the fathers." It
saw the threatened ruin of the country under the Articles of
Confederation, the formation of the Constitution, the rise of political
parties, the growth of the West, the second war with England, and the
apparent triumph of the national spirit over sectionalism.

The new republic had hardly been started in 1783 before its troubles
began. The government could not raise money to pay its debts or running
expenses; it could not protect American commerce and manufactures
against European competition; it could not stop the continual issues of
paper money by the states; it could not intervene to put down domestic
uprisings that threatened the existence of the state governments.
Without money, without an army, without courts of law, the union under
the Articles of Confederation was drifting into dissolution. Patriots,
who had risked their lives for independence, began to talk of monarchy
again. Washington, Hamilton, and Madison insisted that a new
constitution alone could save America from disaster.

By dint of much labor the friends of a new form of government induc