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wise, to impede, burden or control in any unrivalled, as well upon the unanimous tes manner, any means or measures adopted by timony of his great contemporaries, as by the Federal government for the execution the whole subsequent judgment of his coun of its powers, and in Gibbons тг. Ogden, 9 trymen. The best judicial fruit our profes Wheat, i, and Brown v. Maryland, 12 sion has produced. . . . He was the central Wheat. 419, the paramount authority of figure, the cynosure, in what may well be Congress to regulate commerce with foreign called the Augustan age of the American nations and among the several States was bar; golden in its jurisprudence, golden in upheld and established. In a series of cases those charged with its service and sharing beginning with Fletcher v. Peck and includ in its administration. . . . He has been esti ing New Jersey v. Wilson, 7 Cranch 164, mated as the lawyer and the judge without Sturges v. Crowninshield, 4 Wheat. 122; proper consideration of how much more he Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 W7heat. accomplished and how much more is due 518, the inviolability of the obligation of to him from his country and the world than contracts from impairment by any State was. can ever be due to any mere lawyer or judge. The assertion may, perhaps, be regarded as adjudged. This meagre statement is trite, and seems a strong one, but I believe it will bear the not only axiomatic, but unimportant to us of test of reflection, and certainly the test of to-day. It is like a statement of the law of reading in American history, that practically gravity. But when it is reflected that nearly speaking we are indebted to Chief Justice the whole structure of our constitutional Marshall for the American Constitution. law has been reared upon these foundations. . . He was not the commentator upon laid by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall, the mag American Constitutional law: he was not nitude and importance of these decisions the expounder of it; he was the author, the cannot be too greatly conceived. As was so creator of it. The future Hallam, who shall justly and eloquently said at Saratoga on sit down with patient study to trace and elu August 2i, 1879, by the Hon. E. J. Phelps, cidate the constitutional history of this coun at the first meeting of the American Bar try, to follow it from its origin through its Association : experimental period, and its growth to its "A soldier of the Revolution, the com perfection, to pursue it from its cradle, not, panion and friend of Washington, as after I trust, to its grave, but rather to its immor wards his complete and eloquent biographer, tality, will find it all for its first half century greatly distinguished at the bar and in the in those luminous judgments in which Mar public service before he became Chief Jus shall, with an unanswerable logic and a pen tice, and then presiding in that capacity for of light, laid before the world the conclu so long a time, with such extraordinary sions of his court. It is all there, and there ability, with such unprecedented success, if it will be found and be studied by future the field of his success had been only the generations. The life of Marshall was itself ordinary field of elevated judicial duty, his a constitutional history of the country from life would still have been, in my judgment, iSoi to 1835. ... I shall not try to depict, one of the most cherished memories of our no poor words of mine could depict, the profession and best worthy to be had spectacle which that unassuming, but digni in perpetual remembrance. Pinckney fied tribunal presented during thirty-five [Pinkney] summed up his whole char years of time, while with unabated strength acter, when he declared that Marshall he continued to preside there until the snows was born to be the Chief Justice of of four-score winters had fallen on his head; whatever country his lot might happen surrounded by the associates and the circle to be cast in. He stood pre-eminent and of advocates I have referred to, dealing with i