tution could
never have been put into practical working order. In another respect the
federal judiciary was the most remarkable and original of all the
creations of that wonderful convention. It was charged with the duty of
interpreting, in accordance with the general principles of common law,
the Federal Constitution itself. This is the most noble as it is the
most distinctive feature in the government of the United States. It
constitutes a difference between the American and British systems more
fundamental than the separation of the executive from the legislative
department. In Great Britain the unwritten constitution is administered
by the omnipotent House of Commons; whatever statute is enacted by
Parliament must stand until some future Parliament may see fit to repeal
it. But an act passed by both houses of Congress, and signed by the
president, may still be set aside as unconstitutional by the supreme
court of the United States in its judgments upon individual cases
brought before it. It was thus that the practical working of our Federal
Constitution during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century was
swayed to so great an extent by the profound and luminous decisions of
Chief Justice Marshall, that he must be assigned a foremost place among
the founders of our Federal Union. This intrusting to the judiciary the
whole interpretation of the fundamental instrument of government is the
most peculiarly American feature of the work done by the convention, and
to the stability of such a federation as ours, covering as it does the
greater part of a huge continent, it was absolutely indispensable.

Thus, at length, was realized the sublime conception of a nation in
which every citizen lives under two complete and well-rounded systems of
laws,--the state law and the federal law,--each with its legislature,
its executive, and its judiciary moving one within the other,
noiselessly and without friction. It was one of the longest reaches of
constructive statesmanship ever known in the world. There never was
anything quite like it before, and in Europe it needs much explanation
to-day even for educated statesmen who have never seen its workings. Yet
to Americans it has become so much a matter of course that they, too,
sometimes need to be told how much it signifies. In 1787 it was the
substitution of law for violence between states that were partly
sovereign. In some future still grander convention we trust the same
th