Something such has, in all the past periods of our history, been one of
the functions of the American bar. To vindicate the true interpretation
of the charters of the colonies, to advise what forms of polity, what
systems of jurisprudence, what degree and what mode of liberty these
charters permitted,--to detect and expose that long succession of
infringement which grew at last to the Stamp Act and Tea Tax, and
compelled us to turn from broken charters to national independence,--to
conduct the transcendent controversy which preceded the Revolution, that
grand appeal to the reason of civilization,--this was the work of our
first generation of lawyers: to construct the American constitutions:
the higher praise of the second generation. I claim it in part for the
sobriety and learning of the American bar; for the professional instinct
towards the past; for the professional appreciation of order, forms,
obedience, restraints; for the more than professional, the profound and
wide intimacy with the history of all liberty, classical, mediaeval, and
above all, of English liberty,--I claim it in part for the American bar
that, springing into existence by revolution,--revolution, which more
than anything and all things lacerates and discomposes the popular
mind,--justifying that revolution only on a strong principle of natural
right, with not one single element or agent of monarchy or aristocracy
on our soil or in our blood,--I claim it for the bar that the
constitutions of America so nobly closed the series of our victories!
These constitutions owe to the bar more than their terse and exact
expression and systematic arrangements: they owe to it in part, too,
their elements of permanence; their felicitous reconciliation of
universal and intense liberty with forms to enshrine and regulations to
restrain it; their Anglo-Saxon sobriety and gravity conveyed in the
genuine idiom, suggestive of the grandest civil achievements of that
unequaled race. To interpret these constitutions, to administer and
maintain them, this is the office of our age of the profession. Herein
have we somewhat wherein to glory; hereby we come into the class and
share in the dignity of founders of States, of restorers of States, of
preservers of States.
I said and I repeat that while lawyers, and because we are lawyers, we
are statesmen. We are by profession statesmen. And who may measure the
value of this department of public duty? Doubtless in statesmanship
there are many mansions, and large variety of conspicuous service.
Doubtless to have wisely decided the question of war or peace,--to have
adjusted by a skillful negotiation a thousand miles of unsettled
boundary-line,--to have laid the corner-stone of some vast policy
whereby the currency is corrected, the finances enriched, the measure of
industrial fame filled,--are large achievements. And yet I do not know
that I can point to one achievement of this department of American
statesmanship which can take rank for its consequences of good above
that single decision of the Supreme Court which adjudged that an act of
legislature contrary to the Constitution is void, and that the judicial
department is clothed with the power to ascertain the repugnancy and to
pronounce the legal conclusion. That the framers of the Constitution
intended this should be so is certain; but to have asserted it against
the Congress and the Executive,--to have vindicated it by that easy yet
adamantine demonstration than which the reasonings of the mathematics
show nothing surer,--to have inscribed this vast truth of conservatism
on the public mind, so that no demagogue, not in the last stage of
intoxication, denies it,--this is an achievement of statesmanship of
which a thousand years may not exhaust or reveal all the good.