all again laid the basis
for as sweeping a decision as possible. The terms in which the Maryland
statute was couched indicated clearly that it was directed specifically
against the Bank, and it might easily have been set aside on that
ground. But Marshall went much further and laid down the principle that
the instrumentalities of the National Government are never subject to
taxation by the States in any form whatsoever, and for two reasons.
In the first place, "those means are not given by the people of a
particular State... but by the people of all the States. They are given
by all far the benefit of all," and owe their presence in the State
not to the State's permission but to a higher authority. The State of
Maryland therefore never had the power to tax the Bank in the first
place. Yet waiving this theory, there was, in the second place, flat
incompatibility between the Act of Maryland and the Act of Congress,
not simply because of the specific operation of the former, but rather
because of the implied claim which it made for state authority. "That
the power to tax involves the power to destroy," Marshall continued;
"that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to
create; that there is a plain repugnance in conferring on one government
a power to control the constitutional measures of another, which other,
with respect to those very measures is declared to be supreme over that
which exerts the control, are propositions not to be denied." Nor indeed
is the sovereignty of the State confined to taxation. "That is not the
only mode in which it might be displayed. The question is in truth, a
question of supremacy, and if the right of the States to tax the means
employed by the General Government be conceded, the declaration that the
Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof shall be supreme law
of the land, is empty and unmeaning declamation.... We are unanimously
of opinion," concluded the Chief Justice, "that the law... of Maryland,
imposing a tax on the Bank of the United States is unconstitutional and
void."

Five years later, in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden, * known to
contemporaries as the "Steamboat case," Marshall received the
opportunity to apply his principles of constitutional construction to
the power of Congress to regulate "commerce among the States." For a
quarter of a century Robert R. Livingston and Robert Fulton and their
successors had enjoyed from the Legislature of New