Page:History of the Supreme court of the United States (IA historyofsupreme00myeriala).pdf/18

 forces institutions thus established were designed to represent. To ascertain these facts is a vital preliminary, essential to a clear knowledge of cause and effect springing from concrete economic conditions.

When the Supreme Court of the United States was organized, there was, to be sure, a distinct environment, as there is in all times and ages, The environment then prevailing, however, was so fundamentally different from that related (or rather misrepresented) in the customary histories, that a narrative of it and the conditions leading up to it, is indispensable to a correct understanding of the history and career of the Supreme Court. Once this link is supplied, the nature of the personnel, and the current of the policy, of that Court become clear, and present a continuous and comprehensible account, leaving nothing to the imagination, and no enigmas over which to puzzle.

Steadily, through more than a century and a half, the process of forming on the soil of America a landed and trading aristocracy, on the one hand, and on the other, a menial and dependent laboring and slave class, went on uninterruptedly. Long before the outbreak of the Revolution, society was divided into various classes and these into grades, sharply defined from one another in law, as well as by extent of wealth or by tokens of rank or degradation. With the very settlement of the country, the European system of land and trade frauds had been transplanted—that system of fand seizure by which the feudal barons had aggrandized themselves, and that system of fraud in trade by which European merchants had grown rich. Throughout New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia enormous estates were gradually acquired. Some were obtained by fraud upon the Indians, or by bribing royal officials, or both; still others by the officials clandestinely using their authority to secure vast estates for themselves.