reater sway than formerly,
and the imagination less. The age of magic, and witches, and ghosts, has
passed away. That of poetry is on the wane. Speculation has taken the
place of taste. What once passed unheeded, or was perceived only as it
was felt, must now be analyzed, and sifted, and decompounded, until we
have reached its elements, and a reason is required for every thing.
Such is the spirit of the age, and it is eminently favourable to
constitutional doubts and scruples.

We may already perceive the progress of this captious, inquisitive,
hair-splitting spirit, in the brief chronicle of the federal
government. When congress met, immediately after the formation of the
constitution, in laying an impost, they endeavoured so to lay it, as to
give encouragement to those species of industry for which the country
seemed best suited, and their successors continued the same policy for
about thirty years, when it was discovered, (we think by a member from
Maine) that the policy was contrary to the constitution. The discovery
was soon welcomed by many of the politicians of the South, and it has
since been so cordially embraced by them, that the opposite opinion is
now looked upon as downright political heresy.

A bankrupt law was passed during the first Mr. Adams's administration,
by virtue of the express power given to congress on that subject. When
Mr. Jefferson came into power, the law was repealed as inexpedient,
because it was believed to produce as much fraud and mischief in some
ways as it prevented in others. But nobody had then discovered that the
law was unconstitutional. Yet in 1822, that doctrine was broached and
zealously maintained by three or four members from the South, so as to
induce Mr. Lowndes, who was himself opposed to a bankrupt law, to
disavow the doctrines of his associates. That exemplary man, the
character of whose mind was sufficiently inclined to refined
speculation, if it had not been so tempered by candour and sound
practical sense, never lost sight of the end of government, in his view
of the means; and he believed that in interpreting the constitution, we
ought not to look at it through a microscope, for this plain reason, if
for no other, because those who are finally to decide on it look at it
with their ordinary eyes. Accordingly, in the first half of his speech,
he aimed to show that congress had the power to pass the law, and in the
last, that they ought not to exercise it.

Again: Mr