e poor of the district of Columbia: and in Mr. John Quincy Adams's,
the Cherokee treaty--the nullification doctrine--the power of appointing
public officers, together with several of the others previously
mentioned.

To these questions we might add many of minor importance or interest,
and that multitude which have arisen and been decided in the Supreme
Court of the United States. But if the number is already so great, what
will it be a century or two hence? Let it be remembered, too, that each
of these legislative questions may give rise to many others connected
with them, and that each one may be multiplied to infinity in the courts
of justice. Thus, if protecting duties for the encouragement of
manufactures are unconstitutional, the duty claimed on every bale of
imported goods may be called in question.

Whenever, then, any of these constitutional questions can be made, it
would be competent for the party interested, by the doctrines of these
political puritans, to make them. So that in every controversy, public
or private, every conflict of right or interest, as the question of
constitutionality would be completely open to the judge, and in criminal
cases, to the jury, either party may take his chance of success by
urging that interpretation of the constitution which best suits him, and
the same question would, of course, be decided one way in one place, and
another way in another. One man would be convicted for an offence for
which another would go unpunished; and one citizen, or one state, be
subjected to taxes under the constitution, from which others would be
shielded by the same instrument.

Does any one doubt, that if a constitution is left to the unrestricted
interpretation of every one who swears to support it, there would be
this diversity? Let him look at the various commentaries on the same
text in the New Testament. Let him look at the various interpretations
of the same decrees of the Senate by the Edicts of the Pretors in Roman
jurisprudence--to say nothing of those countless decisions of the civil
law, by which, before the time of Justinian, it was buried beneath its
own rubbish. Let him look at the voluminous reports in our own language
on the written, as well as common law--on the infinite number of
questions that have arisen, and are yet arising on a single statute, or
even one of its sections,--let him consider these apposite examples, and
ask whether our constitution is likely to share a differ