ns which involve the national peace and harmony."
Now, Sir, this either had no sensible meaning at all, or else it meant
that the jurisdiction of the national judiciary should extend to these
questions, _with a paramount authority_. It is not to be supposed that
the Convention intended that the power of the national judiciary should
extend to these questions, and that the power of the judicatures of the
States should also extend to them, _with equal power of final decision_.
This would be to defeat the whole object of the provision. There were
thirteen judicatures already in existence. The evil complained of, or
the danger to be guarded against, was contradiction and repugnance in
the decisions of these judicatures. If the framers of the Constitution
meant to create a fourteenth, and yet not to give it power to revise and
control the decisions of the existing thirteen, then they only intended
to augment the existing evil and the apprehended danger by increasing
still further the chances of discordant judgments. Why, Sir, has it
become a settled axiom in politics that every government must have a
judicial power coextensive with its legislative power? Certainly, there
is only this reason, namely, that the laws may receive a uniform
interpretation and a uniform execution. This object cannot be otherwise
attained. A statute is what it is judicially interpreted to be; and if
it be construed one way in New Hampshire, and another way in Georgia,
there is no uniform law. One supreme court, with appellate and final
jurisdiction, is the natural and only adequate means, in any government,
to secure this uniformity. The Convention saw all this clearly; and the
resolution which I have quoted, never afterwards rescinded, passed
through various modifications, till it finally received the form which
the article now bears in the Constitution.

It is undeniably true, then, that the framers of the Constitution
intended to create a national judicial power, which should be paramount
on national subjects. And after the Constitution was framed, and while
the whole country was engaged in discussing its merits, one of its most
distinguished advocates, Mr. Madison, told the people that it _was true,
that, in controversies relating to the boundary between the two
jurisdictions, the tribunal which is ultimately to decide is to be
established under the general government_. Mr. Martin, who had been a
member of the Convention, asserted the same thing