Page:The Supreme Court in United States History vol 1.djvu/45

Rh termed "one of the strongest and most enduring strands of that mighty cable woven by him to hold the American people together as a united and imperishable nation." ^

Moreover, it has been through the exercise of this power to pass upon the validity of State statutes, un- der the Judiciary Act, that the Court has largely con- trolled and directed the course of the economic and social development of the United States. It is diflS- cult to imagine what the history of the country would have been if there had been no Dartmouth College Case on the security of corporate charters; no Mc- CuUoch V. Maryland on the right of a State to tax a National agency; no Gibbons v. Ogden on interstate commerce ; no Brown v. Maryland or Passenger Cases on foreign conmierce; no Craig v. Missouri on State bills of credit; no Charles River Bridge Case on State powers over corporations ; no Slaughterhouse Cases on the scoi>e of the Fourteenth Amendment. If it should be answered that, even if this Section did not exist, the question of the validity of a State statute might in some cases have arisen and been determined in suits in the Circuit Courts of the United States, and might have thus reached the Supreme Court from the inferior Federal Courts, this may be admitted ; and yet it would have been a slender reed on which to rest the enforcement of the supremacy of the Constitution over conflicting State legislation.^

But while it may be truly said that to the existence

1 Marikall, TV, 843.

siz years of our judicial htstory (untfl 1866) were practically confined to cases based on diverse dtizraship, so that the possibility of testing a State law would depend on its affecting a dticen of another State; in the second place, nothing could prevent a State from disregarding a judgment of the Supreme Court ren- dered in such a suit, or nullifying it by the simple device of making it a penal of- fense for a person to conform to the judgment of the Federal Court rather than to the provisions of the State law, and the validity of a conviction in a State Court under such a criminal statute could not have been tested in the Supreme Court.
 * In the first place, suits in the Federal Circuit Courts during the first seventy-