mewhat too grudging encomium of Marshall, had pronounced the
Constitution "a frail and worthless fabric."

Marshall's own outlook upon his task sprang in great part from a
profound conviction of calling. He was thoroughly persuaded that he knew
the intentions of the framers of the Constitution--the intentions
which had been wrought into the instrument itself--and he was equally
determined that these intentions should prevail. For this reason he
refused to regard his office merely as a judicial tribunal; it was a
platform from which to promulgate sound constitutional principles, the
very cathedra indeed of constitutional orthodoxy. Not one of the cases
which elicited his great opinions but might easily have been decided
on comparatively narrow grounds in precisely the same way in which he
decided it on broad, general principles, but with the probable result
that it would never again have been heard of outside the law courts. To
take a timid or obscure way to a merely tentative goal would have been
at variance equally with Marshall's belief in his mission and with his
instincts as a great debater. Hence he forged his weapon--the obiter
dictum--by whose broad strokes was hewn the highroad of a national
destiny.

Marshall's task naturally was not performed in vacuo: he owed much
to the preconceptions of his contemporaries. His invariable quest, as
students of his opinions are soon aware, was for the axiomatic, for
absolute principles, and in this inquiry he met the intellectual demands
of a period whose first minds still owned the sway of the syllogism and
still loved what Bacon called the "spacious liberty of generalities." In
Marshall's method--as in the older syllogistic logic, whose phraseology
begins to sound somewhat strange to twentieth century ears--the
essential operation consisted in eliminating the "accidental" or
"irrelevant" elements from the "significant" facts of a case, and then
recognizing that this particular case had been foreseen and provided for
in a general rule of law. Proceeding in this way Marshall was able to
build up a body of thought the internal consistency of which, even
when it did not convince, yet baffled the only sort of criticism which
contemporaries were disposed to apply. Listen, for instance, to the
despairing cry of John Randolph of Roanoke: "All wrong," said he of one
of Marshall's opinions, "all wrong, but no man in the United States can
tell why or wherein."

Marshall found his f