ular opinions and
sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects
it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is
impossible; and the rule of a majority, as a permanent arrangement, is
wholly inadmissible. So that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy
or despotism in some form is all that is left.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional
questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that
such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit,
as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high
respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments
of the government; and while it is obviously possible that such
decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect
following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance
that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases,
can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice.

At the same time the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of
the government upon the vital questions affecting the whole people is to
be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant
they are made, as in ordinary litigation between parties in personal
actions, the people will have ceased to be their own masters, unless
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 into political purposes. One section of our country
believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other
believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended; and this is the only
substantial dispute; and the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution,
and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade, are each as
well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the
moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great
body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and
a few break over in each. This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured, and
it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections
than before. The foreign slave trade, now im