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xiv slave was property, and the rights of property were sacred. Once only, by the third legal-tender decision, has the court markedly failed in the chief purpose for which it was created, and this failure is the more extraordinary, for none knew better than the judges that it was to prevent just such outrages as fiat money that the national government was created, and that the very words "legal tender," except as applied to intrinsic money for commercial and legal convenience, are a lie and a fraud, through which someone is to be robbed. To allege that the "right to make notes of the government a legal tender" has been deemed "one of the powers of sovereignty in other civilized nations," which were the grounds on which the decision was based, was to place our national government on a par with those which have notoriously been planned for the benefiting of some at the expense of others, and to destroy the very pledge of justice that the majority gave to the minority in 1788. The pride of this country has been that elsewhere the majority or the minority, depending on the degree of power enjoyed by each, has abused the other, but that here they were equal before the law.

In its secondary function, of protecting the minority from the state legislatures, the general government, wherever it possessed jurisdiction, has been equally successful. By the eleventh amendment the power of citizens to sue a state in the national courts was forbidden, and this has allowed state governments to repudiate and in other ways rob, as of old, but wherever the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court has reached, it has honestly and fearlessly protected the minority from the majority. This has at moments produced intense feeling against the national judiciary by the states, and between 1818 and 1832 a long series of legal conflicts took place, leading to many protests by the state legislatures. But though the state governments successfully resisted in a few cases the mandate of the court, the advantage was only temporary, and to-day no state dares to resist, however much it may question, a decision.