an earnest desire to vindicate his [Marshall's] memory from the
imputation of rashness," filed passionate and unavailing dissents. With
difficulty he was dissuaded from resigning from a tribunal whose days of
influence he thought gone by. * * * * During the same year Justice Henry
Baldwin, another of Marshall's friends and associates, published his
"View of the Constitution," in which he rendered high praise to
the departed Chief Justice's qualifications as expounder of the
Constitution. "No commentator," he wrote, "ever followed the text more
faithfully, or ever made a commentary more accordant with its strict
intention and language.... He never brought into action the powers
of his mighty mind to find some meaning in plain words... above
the comprehension of ordinary minds.... He knew the framers of the
Constitution, who were his compatriots," he was himself the historian
of its framing, wherefore, as its expositor, "he knew its objects,
its intentions." Yet in the face of these admissions, Baldwin rejects
Marshall's theory of the origin of the Constitution and the corollary
doctrine of liberal construction. "The history and spirit of the times,"
he wrote, "admonish us that new versions of the Constitution will
be promulgated to meet the varying course of political events or
aspirations of power."

* Milton vs. New York. 11 Peters, 102.

* * Briscoe vs. Bank of Kentucky, 11 Peters, 257.

* * * Charles River Bridge Company vs. Warren Bridge Company, 11
Peters, 420.

* * * * He wrote Justice McLean, May 10, 1837: "There will not, I
fear, even in our day, be any case in which a law of a State or of
Congress will be declared unconstitutional; for the old constitutional
doctrines are fast fading away." "Life and Letters of Joseph Story."
vol. II, p. 272; see also p. 270, for Chancellor Kent's unfavorable
reaction to these decisions.

But the radical impulse soon spent itself. Chief Justice Taney himself
was a good deal of a conservative. While he regarded the Supreme Court
rather as an umpire between two sovereignties than as an organ of the
National Government for the vigorous assertion of its powers, which was
Marshall's point of view, Taney was not at all disposed to disturb the
law as it had been declared by his predecessor in binding decisions.
Then, too, the development of railroading and the beginning of
immigration from Europe on a large scale reawakened the interest of
a great part of the natio