with which it spoke when it came from
the hands of its framers, and was voted on and adopted by the people of
the United States. Any other rule of construction would abrogate the
judicial character of this Court, and make it the mere reflex of the
popular opinion or passion of the day. This Court was not created by the
Constitution for such purposes. Higher and graver trusts have been
confided to it; and it must not falter in the path of duty!" Would to
God it had not faltered in the path of duty, that it had been true to
those higher and graver trusts! Would that it had not been the mere
reflex of popular opinion or the passion of the day, that it had not
abrogated its judicial character! Would that it had read the plain words
in the holy spirit in which they were written! Would that it had left
the Constitution as it was, and, instead of thus writing its own
condemnation, had shown how efficient an instrument that Constitution
would be, if fearlessly used to carry out the great principles of
humanity for which its preamble declares it was established!

Here is the key to the new distinction between the Constitution as it is
and the Constitution as it was. But as it was in the beginning, so it is
and shall be.

But Taney could not stop here. Compromises had been made through the
other branches of the government,--compromises held sacred for more than
a generation, in the vain hope to appease the insatiate lust of the
Slave Power. He went on with a longer and lower argument to declare one
branch of the Compromise--the act of Congress prohibiting slavery in
territory north of 36 deg. 30'--void.

Even more,--for he seemed determined to make clean work of it,--he went
on to say that a slave who had been made free by being taken (not
escaping, but by being carried by his owner) to a Free State was reduced
to slavery again on arriving back in the State from which he had been
taken, and that that was the result of Strader _vs._ Graham, which
declared that the _status_ of persons, whether free or slave, depended
on the State law. Here, again, he sacrificed his cherished party
principles to his love for Slavery. Else how could the State to which
the slave had been carried be deprived of its right to enfranchise, or
how could the United States power be extended further than to the
expressly granted case of escape?

But no. He was a judicial Calhoun. His dogma was that the fundamental
law guaranteed property in man. He decla