Page:Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law.djvu/3

Rh ters, by Act of Parliament, by the direct annulling of legislation by the Crown, by juidicial proceedinigs and an ultiinate appeal to the Privy Council. Our practice was a natural result of this; but it was by no means a necessary one. All this colonial restraint was onily the usual and normal exercise of power. An external authority had imposed the terms of the charters, the authority of a para- motunt government, fully organized and equipped for every exigency of disobedience, with a king and legislature and courts of its own. The superior right and authority of this government were fundamental here, and fully recognized; and it was only a usual, orderly, necessary procedure when our own courts enforced the same rights that were enforced here by the appellate courts in England. These charters were in the strict sense written law: as their restraints upon the colonial legislatures were enforced by the English courts of last resort, so might they be enforced through the colonial courts, by disregarding as null what went counter to them.

The Revolution came, and what happened thien? Simply this: we cut the cord that tied us to Great Britain, and there was no longer an external sovereign. Our conception now was that "the people" took his place; that is to say, our own home population in the several States were now their own sovereign. So far as existing institutions were left untouched, they were construed by trans- lating the name and style of the English sovereign into that of our new ruler, — ourselves, the People. After this the charters, and still more obviously the new constitutions, were not so many orders from without, backed by an organized outside government, which simply performed an ordinary function in enforcing them; they were precepts from the people themselves who were to be governed, addressed to each of their own number, and especially to those who were charged with the duty of conductinig the government. No higher power existed to support these orders by conpulsion of the ordinary sort. The sovereign himself, having written these expressions of his will, had retired into the clouds; in any regular course of events he had no organ to enforce his will, except