Page:James Bryce American Commonwealth vol 1.djvu/406

384 out the meaning and application of the few and apparently simple words of the original document into a variety of unforeseen results. The same thing has more or less befallen nearly every section of the Constitution and of the fifteen amendments. The process shows no signs of stopping; nor can it, for the new conditions of economics and politics bring up new problems for solution. But the most important work was that done during the first half century, and especially by Chief-Justice Marshall during his long tenure of the presidency of the Supreme court (1801-1835). It is scarcely an exaggeration to call him, as an eminent American jurist has done, a second maker of the Constitution. I will not borrow the phrase which said of Augustus that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble, because Marshall's function was not to change but to develop. The Constitution was, except of course as regards the political scheme of national government, which was already well established, rather a ground plan than a city. It was, if I may pursue the metaphor, much what the site of Washington was at the beginning of this century, a symmetrical ground plan for a great city, but with only some tall edifices standing here and there among fields and woods. Marshall left it what Washington has now become, a splendid and commodious capital within whose ample bounds there are still some vacant spaces and some mean dwellings, but which, built up and beautified as it has been by the taste and wealth of its rapidly growing population, is worthy to be the centre of a mighty nation. Marshall was, of course, only one among seven judges, but his majestic intellect and the elevation of his character gave him such an ascendency, that he found himself only once in a minority on any constitutional question. His work of building up and working out the Constitution was accomplished not so much by the decisions he gave as by the judgments in which he expounded the principles of these decisions, judgments which for their philosophical breadth, the luminous exactness of their reasoning, and the fine political sense which pervades them, have never been surpassed and