Page:History of the Supreme court of the United States (IA historyofsupreme00myeriala).pdf/11

Rh never been introduced into the accessible archives, and these are lost to the authentic search of the historian.

As will be seen, this work is not one of a routine biographical or descriptive character, dependent upon injections of fanciful matter or dramatic coloring. It seeks to go to the basic depths, and in doing so it becomes far more than a narrative of a single institution, It carries, with a comprehensive history of the development of capitalist resources, power and tactics, and of the great and continuing conflict of classes. It reveals the true sources of the primitive accumulation of wealth which necessarily beginning with the appropriation of land and the dispossession of the workers, have extended to the elaborate and conjointed forms of capitalist power subsisting to-day.

Palpably, a dominant class must have some supreme institution through which it can express its consecutive demands and enforce its will, whether that institution be a king, a Parliament, a Congress, a Court or an army, In the United States, the one all-potent institution automatically responding to these demands and enforcing them has been the Supreme Court of the United States. Vested with absolute and unappealable power, it has been able, with a marvelously adaptable flexibility, to transmute that will not merely into law but into action. Hence, the narrative of that court inevitably becomes a history of the origin and progress of capitalism and correspondingly of the forces in society antagonistic to the capitalist order.

Because, however, the Supreme Court as an institution has throughout its whole existence incarnated into final law the demands of the dominant and interconnected sections of the ruling class it should not be supposed that its members have necessarily been susceptible to the vulgar forms of venal corruption. That the rise and ever-expanding sway of the capitalist class have been accompanied by ceaseless fraud and bribery is overwhelmingly attested by the cumulative