Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/163

.] ; and, in particular, that an appeal to the Supreme Court will not be allowed but in cases of great importance, where the object may be adequate to the expense. The Supreme Court may possibly be directed to sit alternately in different parts of the Union.

The propriety of having a Supreme Court in every government must be obvious to every man of reflection. There can be no other way of securing the administration of justice uniformly in the several states. There might be, otherwise, as many different adjudications on the same subject as there are states. It is to be hoped that, if this government be established, connections still more intimate than the present will subsist between the different states. The same measure of justice, therefore, as to the objects of their common concern, ought to prevail in all. A man in North Carolina, for instance, if he owed £100 here, and was compellable to pay it in good money, ought to have the means of recovering the same sum, if due to him in Rhode Island, and not merely the nominal sum, at about an eighth or tenth part of its intrinsic value. To obviate such a grievance as this, the Constitution has provided a tribunal to administer equal justice to all.

A gentleman has said that the stamp act, and the taking away of the trial by jury, were the principal causes of resistance to Great Britain, and seemed to infer that opposition would therefore be justified on this part of the system The stamp act was much earlier than the immediate cause of our independence. But what was the great ground of opposition to the stamp act? Surely it was because the act was not passed by our own representatives, but by those of Great Britain. Under this Constitution, taxes are to be imposed by our own representatives in the General Congress. The fewness of their numbers will be compensated by the weight and importance of their characters. Our representatives will be in proportion to those of the other states. This case is« certainly not like that of taxation by a foreign legislature. In respect to the trial by jury, its being taken away, in certain cases, was, to be sure, one of the causes assigned in the Declaration of Independence. But that was done by a foreign legislature, which might continue it so forever; and therefore jealousy was justly excited. But this Constitution has not taken it away, and it is left to the discretion of our own legislature to act, in this respect, as