al as wide as
possible. In proportion to the grounds of confidence in, or distrust
of, the subordinate tribunals, ought to be the facility or difficulty
of appeals. And well satisfied as I am of the propriety of the appellate
jurisdiction, in the several classes of causes to which it is extended
by the plan of the convention. I should consider every thing calculated
to give, in practice, an unrestrained course to appeals, as a source of
public and private inconvenience.

I am not sure, but that it will be found highly expedient and useful,
to divide the United States into four or five or half a dozen districts;
and to institute a federal court in each district, in lieu of one in
every State. The judges of these courts, with the aid of the State
judges, may hold circuits for the trial of causes in the several parts
of the respective districts. Justice through them may be administered
with ease and despatch; and appeals may be safely circumscribed within a
narrow compass. This plan appears to me at present the most eligible of
any that could be adopted; and in order to it, it is necessary that the
power of constituting inferior courts should exist in the full extent in
which it is to be found in the proposed Constitution.

These reasons seem sufficient to satisfy a candid mind, that the want
of such a power would have been a great defect in the plan. Let us
now examine in what manner the judicial authority is to be distributed
between the supreme and the inferior courts of the Union.

The Supreme Court is to be invested with original jurisdiction, only "in
cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls, and
those in which A STATE shall be a party." Public ministers of every
class are the immediate representatives of their sovereigns. All
questions in which they are concerned are so directly connected with
the public peace, that, as well for the preservation of this, as out of
respect to the sovereignties they represent, it is both expedient and
proper that such questions should be submitted in the first instance
to the highest judicatory of the nation. Though consuls have not in
strictness a diplomatic character, yet as they are the public agents
of the nations to which they belong, the same observation is in a great
measure applicable to them. In cases in which a State might happen to be
a party, it would ill suit its dignity to be turned over to an inferior
tribunal.

Though it may rather be a digr