before thrown around any other decision. I have never heard of such a thing.

He then went into a discussion of the circumstances under which the decision was rendered and the false premises upon which it was based, and declared that no decision of any court "thus placed has ever been held by the profession as law, and it has always needed confirmation before the lawyers regarded it as settled law." In his Springfield speech of June 26, 1857, already referred to, he also defined his position with reference to the Supreme Court of the United States in the following language:

Judicial decisions have two uses first, to absolutely determine the case decided; and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use they are called 'precedents" and "authorities." We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to and respect for the judicial department of the Government. We think its decisions on constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control not only the particular cases decided but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments to the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Judicial decisions are of greater or less authority

as precedents according to circumstances. That this should be so accords both with common sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed historical facts which were not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the Court more than once, and had there been affirmed and reaffirmed, through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.

Mr. Lincoln never said anything from which it can be inferred that he favored any policy which would curtail even in the slightest degree the independence of the judiciary. He also believed that the majority of the judges had exceeded their duty and had undertaken to decide, in the Dred Scott Case, matters not properly before the court, and that such parts of the opinion as were devoted to a discussion of those questions were what lawyers call obiter dicta. This is shown by his speech at Jonesboro during the great debate, when he declared:

If any points are really extra-judicially decided be

cause not necessarily before them, then this one as to the power of the territorial legislature to exclude slavery is one of them, as also the one that the Missouri Compromise was null and void.

For this reason, as well as others, he refused to accept it "as a political rule.'

In the speech of July 17, 1858, at Springfield, he made it very plain that he intended no assault upon the independence of the judiciary when he said: —

I think that in respect for judicial authority my humble history would not suffer in comparison with that of Judge Douglas. He would have the citizen conform his vote to that decision; the member of Congress his; the President his use of the veto power. He would make it a rule of political action for the people and all the departments of the government. I would not. By resisting it as a political rule, I disturb no right of property, create no disorder, excite no mobs.

Again, in his speech at Quincy October 13, 1858, he recurred to the subject:

We do not propose that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the Court, we as a mob will decide him to be free. We do not propose that, when any other one or one thousand shall be decided by that Court to be slaves, we will in any violent way disturb the rights of property thus settled; but we nevertheless do oppose that decision as a political rule which shall be binding on the voter to vote for nobody who thinks it wrong. We propose so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.

In the first inaugural address he again discussed the subject of the binding effect of the decisions of the Supreme Court, and concluded his discussion of the subject with these words:

If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

Other utterances of Lincoln might be cited which show that he regarded the independence of the judiciary as of supreme importance under the American system of government. With the single exception of the decision in the Dred Scott Case, there is nothing to indicate a disposition on his part to criticize, much less condemn the judges or show the slightest disrespect for either the courts or the judges who composed them. His intimation that there was "a concert of action" between the judges who rendered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott Case, and the slave-power, was uttered in the course of a heated discussion of a question about which the country

was greatly agitated. The battle had been in progress for many years, in Congress and in the political arena. Everywhere, North and South, East and West, on the rostrum, in private and in public, in the domestic and social circles of the land, it had become a disturbing element. It divided families and parted friends. As stated by Mr. Lincoln in his second inaugural address, those who believed that slavery was right and those who believed it wrong both read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invoked "his aid against the other." Those who had been reared and educated entirely amid an environment wherein slavery was regarded as morally and legally right became, by reason of such environment, impregnated with so strong a belief in its legitimacy that it was a part of their very nature to accept slavery as divinely appointed.

It is not surprising therefore that the men who composed the majority of the Supreme Court should have sustained the "right of property in a slave" and the right to hold that property in a United States territory when that question came before them for judicial determination. Those judges could not have failed to understand fully the danger which confronted the nation by the continued discussion of the question; and it may well be that there was a "concert of action" between the judges, Congress, and