Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/410

 402 the power should be restricted; its friends, as strenuously contended, that it was indispensable for the public safety, that it should be general.

§ 931. The general reasoning, by which an unlimited power was sustained, was to the following effect. Every government ought to contain within itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and the complete execution of the trusts, for which it is responsible, free from every other control, but a regard to the public good, and to the security of the people. In other words, every power ought to be proportionate to its object. The duties of superintending the national defence, and of securing the public peace against foreign or domestic violence, involve a provision for casualties and dangers, to which no possible limits can be assigned; and therefore the power of making that provision ought to know no other bounds, than the exigencies of the nation, and the resources of the community. Revenue is the essential engine, by which the means of answering the national exigencies must be procured; and therefore the power of procuring it must necessarily be comprehended in that of providing for those exigencies. Theory, as well as practice, the past experience of other nations, as well as our own sad experience under the confederation, conspire to prove, that the power of procuring revenue is unavailing, and a mere mockery, when exercised over states in their collective capacities. If, therefore, the federal government was to be of any efficiency, and a bond of union, it ought to be invested with an unqualified power of taxation for all national purposes. In the history of mankind it has ordinarily