n pages 84 and 148, to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of
all constitutional questions,--a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one
which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are
as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same
passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their
maxim is, 'Boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem'; and their power is
the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as
the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has
erected no such single tribunal, knowing that, to whatever hands confided,
with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.
It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign with
themselves."

Thus we see the power claimed for the Supreme Court by Judge Douglas, Mr.
Jefferson holds, would reduce us to the despotism of an oligarchy.

Now, I have said no more than this,--in fact, never quite so much as this;
at least I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson.

Let us go a little further. You remember we once had a National Bank. Some
one owed the bank a debt; he was sued, and sought to avoid payment on the
ground that the bank was unconstitutional. The case went to the Supreme
Court, and therein it was decided that the bank was constitutional. The
whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson
himself asserted that he, as President, would not be bound to hold a
National Bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided it
to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted
upon it under his official oath, in vetoing a charter for a National Bank.
The declaration that Congress does not possess this constitutional power
to charter a bank has gone into the Democratic platform, at their
National Conventions, and was brought forward and reaffirmed in their last
Convention at Cincinnati. They have contended for that declaration, in the
very teeth of the Supreme Court, for more than a quarter of a century.
In fact, they have reduced the decision to an absolute nullity. That
decision, I repeat, is repudiated in the Cincinnati platform; and still,
as if to show that effrontery can go no further, Judge Douglas vaunts in
the very speeches in which he denounces me for opposing the Dred Scott
decision that he stands on the Cincinnati platform.

Now, I wish to know what