Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/355

 some of them the issue of adoption was doubtful, for many provisions in the new constitution were bitterly attacked. But its friends were as active in its defense; Hamilton and Madison wielded their pens to good purpose in a publicity campaign, and in the course of time all thirteen States gave the document their indorsement. These letters of Hamilton and Madison in advocacy of the new constitution, subsequently published as "The Federalist," form a notable treatise on the principles of federal government. The new central government began its career forthwith; and in his first inaugural Washington called upon the representatives of the people "to lay the foundations of national policy" in a way that would "command the respect of the world."

STRENGTHENING THE UNION; TERRITORIAL EXPANSION; AND FOREIGN POLICY

Three outstanding features marked the trend of American political history during the first thirty years after the nation became welded into a federal unit. The first of these was the steady extension of those powers which the Constitution had intrusted to the new central government. A dozen years after the establishment of the United States Supreme Court the post of Chief Justice was given to John Marshall and was occupied by him with firmness and dignity until 1835. Marshall was a believer in an efficient central government; he was sure that this was what the framers of the Constitution had meant to establish; and for thirty-four years he devoted his great powers to the work of assaying from the nation's organic law all the jurisdiction it could yield to the authorities of the union. It was under his leadership that the court took the epoch-marking step of declaring that the Constitution gave to the Federal Government not only express but implied powers, and that where the Constitution gave a power to Congress it intrusted to that body a choice of the means to be used in carrying its authority into practical operation. "Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the