CONCLUSION.

The inference from the whole is, that these judges, in thus attempting to overrule former decisions and thwart a course of legislation of more than sixty years' standing, are endeavoring to deprive Congress, and thereby the inhabitants of a territory, of a proper, beneficial power, indispensably necessary to the permanent well-being of the territory. Such a result should never be attempted but upon compulsion, and for reasons of the clearest and most indisputable sufficiency. Such is not at all the character of the reasons upon which these judges have ventured to base their opinions. On the contrary, no lawyer will feel that he hazards anything in characterizing them as about the flimsiest and least satisfactory that ever influenced the opinion of any respectable tribunal upon an important question. As to the nation acquiescing in such an opinion, the idea is preposterous. Instead of quieting the subject, it will only serve still further to inflame the controversy, by stimulating the already too highly excited jealousy of Northern people against the imputed undue influence of the slaveholding power.

What degree of national censure is due to these judges, each citizen must determine for himself.

That they deserve a solemn rebuke, by way of protest, from. Congress, no dispassionate and discreet lawyer can doubt; but that they will receive such rebuke, no man can believe. They themselves present the spectacle of six men not more venerable for their age than for the perfect purity of their private lives, inaccessible to the approach of any of the baser motives of corruption, and holding the most exalted and independent position in the Government, yielding to the suggestions of party sympathy so far as to bring upon themselves the sad reproach of having rendered a political and sectional instead of judicial decision. Their powers of reasoning and judgment, though they may not be of the highest order, yet are abundantly sufficient to have forewarned them that they were doing what there was great danger of being received as a gross insult to the intelligence of the whole nation, and more particularly to the intelligence of the American bar. Having dared and defied this danger, they cannot complain

while receiving the only retribution which can reach them, the indignant censure of an independent bar and an independent press. By this single act they have done more to lower the moral tone and standing of our judiciary than anything that has ever occurred. They have brought the purity, from party bias, of our highest court under just popular suspicion. They have shaken the stability of all law, by destroying that of our highest law. The Constitution is, and must always be, in effect, what practical construction makes it. They have taught the lesson that its construction is never to be considered as settled, but ever to remain a changeable, fluctuating thing, and always be what the party passions and party exigencies of the hour may require.

Should any honest, intelligent reader be disposed to impute an undue severity to these strictures, he is requested to ask himself the question: If the opinions of these judges were as much calculated to do their party injury as they are to do it a benefit, do you, on your conscience, believe that those opinions ever would have been delivered? If he answer in the negative, then he will recognize the duty of every good citizen to lend his aid toward teaching these judges, as a warning to all others, that no station, however exalted or apparently irresponsible, affords exemption or shelter against a properly evoked national censure.

Finally, it may be claimed to have been proved:

First. That the Court had no jurisdiction or lawful authority to decide or intimate an opinion on any point, except that a negro cannot be a citizen; and the attempted apology for so doing is so destitute of even plausibility as to betray a reckless purpose, for some unavowed reason, to reach and decide the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise.

Second. That the clause of the Constitution giving power to "make all needful regulations respecting the territory" is the true source of the power to govern territories; the language being sufficient, and it being contrary to principle to resort to any implied power when there is an ample express grant. That in denying this, and attempting to restrict the application of the clause to old territory, the Court willfully violates the settled construction of sixty years' duration, as manifested by the writings of our ablest commentators, the debates of our most eminent statesmen, and the repeated decisions of the Supreme Court, that

of the present judges included. That the attempted apology for so doing is so unsatisfactory and so badly sustained by the reasoning of the Court as to betray an improper anxiety to get rid of the legislative and judicial precedents against them.

Third. That the power of Congress over a territory extends to all needful legislation not expressly prohibited, as proved by a reiterated course of unchallenged legislation during near seventy years, under the direct sanction of express decisions of the Supreme Court, and in accordance with the plain language of the Constitution.

Fourth. That the power to prohibit slavery in, or to prohibit the importation of slaves into, a territory, is a needful power, as proved by practical experience, together with the repeated action of Congress and the legislation of every State in the Union. That this power belongs to Congress because it is not expressly denied, being an indisputable part of unrestricted sovereignty, and because the Constitution itself bears full proof of the intention to confer the power, the Constitution saying, as it does, that the power to regulate foreign commerce carries the power to prohibit importation of slaves; and the power to make all needful regulations respecting a territory necessarily including the power to regulate its commerce, must also include the power to prohibit the introduction of slaves into a territory, according to the plain intention of the Constitution. That the novel assertion of the Court, that such prohibition deprives a man of his property without due course of law, within the meaning of the Constitution, is sustained by no one reason that the Court could invent, nor by any authority that it could find, but is opposed by cotemporaneous exposition of the meaning of the framers of the Constitution and a host of legislative and judicial precedents both State and Federal.

Fifth. That the prohibition made by the Missouri Compromise was just and politic, even if viewed solely in reference to the white population of the slave States themselves, at least fourfifths of them being non-slaveowners, and furnishing from their class nine-tenths of the probable emigrants from the slave States to such a territory as Kansas.

END OF VOL. II.