e it was essential to control law-making bodies, it was
imperative to have as their auxiliary the bodies that interpreted law.
To a large extent the United States since then has lived not under
legislative-made law, but under a purely separate and extraneous form of
law which has superseded the legislature product, namely, court law.
Although nowhere in the United States Constitution is there even the
suggestion that courts shall make law, yet this past century and more
they have been gradually building up a formidable code of
interpretations which substantially ranks as the most commanding kind of
law. And these interpretations have, on the whole, consistently
followed, and kept pace with, the changing interests of the dominant
class, whether traders, slaveholders, or the present trusts.

This decision of the august courts opened the way for the greatest orgy
of corruption and the most stupendous frauds. In New York,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other States a
continuous rush to get bank charters ensued. Most of the legislatures
were composed of men who, while perhaps, not innately corrupt, were
easily seduced by the corrupt temptations held out by the traders. There
was a deep-seated hostility, in many parts of the country, on the part
of the middling tradesmen--the shopkeepers and the petty merchants--to
any laws calculated to increase the power and the privileges of the
superior traders and the landowners. Among the masses of workers, most
of whom were, however, disfranchised, any attempt to vest the rich with
new privileges, was received with the bitterest resentment. But the
legislatures were approachable; some members who were put there by the
rich families needed only the word as to how they should vote, while
others, representing both urban and rural communities, were swayed by
bribes. By one means or another the traders and landholders forced the
various legislatures into doing what was wanted.

Omitting the records of other States, a few salient facts as to what
took place in New York State will suffice to give a clear idea of some
of the methods of the trading class in pressing forward their conquests,
in hurling aside every impediment, whether public opinion or law, and in
creating new laws which satisfied their extending plans for a
ramification of profit-producing interests. If forethought, an
unswerving aim and singleness of execution mean anything, then there
was something ste