of the United States, this
declaration should never be made except in a clear case. Every
possible presumption is in favor of the validity of a statute, and
this continues until the contrary is shown beyond a rational doubt.
One branch of the government cannot encroach on the domain of another
without danger. The safety of our institutions depends in no small
degree on a strict observance of this salutary rule." And this is
exactly what happened. The judiciary here assumed the function of the
legislative department. Not even a casual reader on examining these
laws and the Constitution can feel that the court in this case felt
such a clear and strong conviction as to the invalidity of this
constitutional legislation when that tribunal, as its records show,
had under different circumstances before the Civil War held a doctrine
decidedly to the contrary.

Mr. Justice Harlan, therefore, dissented. He considered the opinion of
the court narrow, as the substance and spirit were sacrificed by a
subtle and ingenious verbal criticism. Justice Harlan believed, "that
it is not the words of the law but the internal sense of it that makes
the law; the letter of the law is the body, the sense and reason of
the law the soul." "Constitutional provisions adopted in the interest
of liberty," said Justice Harlan, "and for the purpose of securing,
through national legislation, if need be, rights inhering in a state
of freedom, and belonging to American citizenship, have been so
construed as to defeat the end the people desire to accomplish, which
they attempted to accomplish, and which they supposed they had
accomplished, by changes in their fundamental law."

The court, according to Justice Harlan, although he did not mean to
say that the determination in this case should have been materially
controlled by considerations of mere expediency or policy, had
departed from the familiar rule requiring that the purpose of the law
or Constitution and the objects to be accomplished by any grant are
often the most important in reaching real intent just as the debates
in the convention of 1787 and the discussions in the _Federalist_ and
in the ratifying conventions of the States have often been referred to
as throwing important light on clauses in the Constitution seeming to
show ambiguity. The debates on the war amendment, when they were
proposed and ratified, were thoroughly expounded before the court in
bringing before that tribunal the intenti