Page:Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law.djvu/4

 those to whom his orders were addressed in these documents. How then should his written constitution be enforced if these agencies did not obey him, if they failed, or worked amiss?

Here was really a different problem from that which had been presented under the old state of things. And yet it happened that no new provisions were made to meet it. The old methods and the old conceptions were followed. In Connecticut, in 1776, by a mere legislative Act, the charter of 1662 was declared to continue "the civil Constitution of the State, under the sole authority of the People tlhereof, independent of any King or Prince whatsoever; and then two or three familiar fundamental rtiles of liberty and good government were added as a part of it. Under this the people of Connecticut lived till 1818. In Rhode Island the charter, unaltered, served their turn until 1842 ; anid, as is well known, it was tupon this that one of tlhe early cases of judicial action arose for enforcing constitutional provisions under the new order of tlhings, as against a legislative Act; namely, the case of Trevett v. Weeden, in the Rhode Island Suprenme Court in. 1786.

But it is instructive to see that this new application of judicial power wvas not universally assented to. It was denied by several mernbers of the Federal convention, and was referred to as unsettled by various judges in the last two decades of the last century. The surprise of the Rhode Island legislature at the action of the court in Trevett v. Weeden seems to indicate an impression in their minds that the change from colonial dependence to inde- pendence had made the legislature the substitute for Parliament, with a like omnipotence. In Vermont it seems to have been the established doctrine of the period that the judiciary could not dis-regard a legislative Act; and the same view was held in Connec-