f day, as it were, what
was in the instrument from the first.

In the case of judicial review as exercised by the Supreme Court of the
United States in relation to the national Constitution, its preservative
character has been at times a theme of enthusiastic encomium, as in the
following passage from a speech by the late Chief Justice White, made
shortly before he ascended the Bench:

... The glory and ornament of our system which distinguishes
it from every other government on the face of the earth is
that there is a great and mighty power hovering over the
Constitution of the land to which has been delegated the awful
responsibility of restraining all the coordinate departments
of government within the walls of the governmental fabric
which our fathers built for our protection and immunity.[1]

At other times the subject has been dealt with less enthusiastically,
even skeptically.

One obstacle that the theory encountered very early was the refusal of
certain Presidents to regard the Constitution as primarily a source of
rules for judicial decision. It was rather, they urged, a broadly
discretionary mandate to themselves and to Congress. And pursuing the
logic of this position, they contended that while the Court was
undoubtedly entitled to read the Constitution independently for the
purpose of deciding cases, this very purpose automatically limited the
authoritativeness of its readings; and that within their respective
jurisdictions President and Congress enjoyed the same correlative
independence as the Court did within its jurisdiction. This was, in
effect, the position earlier of Jefferson and Jackson, later of Lincoln,
and in recent times that of the two Roosevelts.

Another obstacle has been of the Court's own making. Whether because of
the difficulty of amending the Constitution or for cautionary reasons,
the Court took the position, as early as 1851, that it would reverse
previous decisions on constitutional issues when convinced they were
erroneous.[2] An outstanding instance of this nature was the decision in
the Legal Tender cases, in 1871, reversing the decision which had been
rendered in Hepburn _v._ Griswold fifteen months earlier;[3] and no less
shattering to the prestige of _stare decisis_ in the constitutional
field was the Income Tax decision of 1895,[4] in which the Court
accepted Mr. Joseph Choate's invitation to "correct a century of error".
The "constitut