t,
pretty rapidly decreasing, and supposing the capitalist to be fully
alive to the need of administrative improvements, a phalanx of
Washingtons would be impotent to raise the administrative level of the
United States materially, as long as the courts remain censors of
legislation; because the province of the censorial court is to dislocate
any comprehensive body of legislation, whose effect would be to change
the social status. That was the fundamental purpose which underlay the
adoption of a written constitution whose object was to keep local
sovereignties intact, especially at the South. Jefferson insisted that
each sovereignty should by means of nullification protect itself. It was
a long step in advance when the nation conquered the prerogative of
asserting its own sovereign power through the Supreme Court. Now the
intervention of the courts in legislation has become, by the change in
environment, as fatal to administration as would have been, in 1800,
the success of nullification. I find it difficult to believe that
capital, with its specialized views of what constitutes its advantages,
its duties, and its responsibilities, and stimulated by a bar moulded to
meet its prejudices and requirements, will ever voluntarily assent to
the consolidation of the United States to the point at which the
interference of the courts with legislation might be eliminated;
because, as I have pointed out, capital finds the judicial veto useful
as a means of at least temporarily evading the law, while the bar, taken
as a whole, quite honestly believes that the universe will obey the
judicial decree. No delusion could be profounder and none, perhaps, more
dangerous. Courts, I need hardly say, cannot control nature, though by
trying to do so they may, like the Parliament of Paris, create a
friction which shall induce an appalling catastrophe.

True judicial courts, whether in times of peace or of revolution, seldom
fail to be a substantial protection to the weak, because they enforce an
established _corpus juris_ and conduct trials by recognized forms. It is
startling to compare the percentage of convictions to prosecutions, for
the same class of offences, in the regular criminal courts during the
French Revolution, with the percentage in the Revolutionary Tribunal.
And once a stable social equilibrium is reached, all men tend to support
judicial courts, if judicial courts exist, from an instinct of
self-preservation. This has been amp