to them by the people, I, in administering the justice of the country,
will meet the united powers at my seat in this tribunal, and, pointing
to the Constitution, will say to them: 'Here is the limit of your
authority; hither shall you go, but no further.'" The Virginian
legislature gave way, and repealed the act.

After the Federal Constitution was drawn up, Hamilton, in the
seventy-eighth number of the _Federalist_, argued that the power
belonged to the judiciary; but it was not constitutionally recognised
until 1801. "This," said Madison, "makes the judiciary department
paramount, in fact, to the legislature, which was never intended, and
can never be proper. In a government whose vital principle is
responsibility, it never will be allowed that the legislative and
executive departments should be completely subjected to the judiciary,
in which that characteristic feature is so faintly seen." Wilson, on
the other hand, justified the practice on the principle of the higher
law: "Parliament may, unquestionably, be controlled by natural or
revealed law, proceeding from divine authority. Is not this superior
authority binding upon the courts of justice? When the courts of
justice obey the superior authority, it cannot be said with propriety
that they control the inferior one; they only declare, as it is their
duty to declare, that this inferior one is controlled by the other,
which is superior. They do not repeal an act of Parliament; they
pronounce it void, because contrary to an overruling law." Thus the
function of the judiciary to be a barrier against democracy, which,
according to Tocqueville, it is destined to be, was not apparent. In
the same manner religious liberty, which has become so much identified
with the United States, is a thing which grew by degrees, and was not
to be found imposed by the letter of the law.

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system,
which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the
state governments by the powers they have ceded. It is the one
immortal tribute of America to political science, for state rights are
at the same time the consummation and the guard of democracy. So much
so that an officer wrote, a few months before Bull Run: "The people in
the south are evidently unanimous in the opinion that slavery is
endangered by the current of events, and it is useless to attempt to
alter that opinion. As our government is founded on the will o