Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/208

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS and statesmen who are in the habit of construing laws and constitutions by the light of experience and by the rules which the great jurists of all ages have laid down for their construction, know that in order to decide what a law of doubtful import means, you must look at the subject mat- ter, at the cause of its enactment ; you must look at the evils it was designed to correct, and the remedy it was designed to give. Gentlemen of the Convention, that venerable, that able, that revered jurist, the honorable chief justice of the United States, trembling upon the very verge of the grave, for years kept merely alive by the pure spirit of patriotic duty that burns within his breast — a spirit that will not permit him to succumb to the gnawings of disease and to the weaknesses of mortality — • which hold him, as it were, suspended between two worlds, with his spotless ermine around him, standing upon the very altar of justice, has given to us the utterance of the Supreme Court of the United States upon this very question. Let the murmur of the hustings be stilled — • let the voices of individual citizens, no matter how great and respected in their appropriate spheres, be hushed, while the law, as expounded by the constituted authority of the country, emotionless, passionless and just, rolls in its sil- very cadence over the entire realm, from the At- lantic to the Pacific, and from the ice-bound regions of the North to the glittering waters of the Gulf. What says that decision? That 198