opinion, and the latest act of parliament is the law of the land. Is not the latter more free than the former?
More free but less stable, we answer; more power to the majority and less privilege to the whole people. In this condition rests the great distinction of the constitution of the United States. History has often recorded the grant of rights or privileges to subjects by kings or by aristocracies or by minorities.[1] But the federal compact was the first deliberate attempt and assent of a majority to tie its own hands; to give to the minority guarantees of fair and equal treatment, without which democratic government is well-nigh impossible, save when developed along the lines of socialism. Our state governments, in which few such guarantees have been successfully evolved, have again and again oppressed the minority; but, with hardly an exception, the national government has been true to its purposes. Where the state governments have been unchecked by the national; where they have had omnipotent powers, they have directly or indirectly robbed classes of their citizens for the benefit of other classes, and committed other wrongs in the name and by the will of the majority. Not long since New York state, one of the fairest and least prone to discrimination in the Union, by law has decreed that a minority of its citizens shall be made to contribute, by means of an inheritance tax, the larger part of the government revenues; so in Great Britain the majority have successfully, through a graded succession tax, placed undue burdens upon the minority; and in neither have the minority the slightest recourse, unless that of expatriation can be considered such. But in our national government the most distinct limitations have been fixed, and when recently, in the income tax of 1894, the majority endeavored to tax the minority, while exempting themselves, the law was annulled, because it was unconstitutional.
This guarantee to the minority in the federal constitu-
- ↑ Instanced in Magna Charta and the French Bill of Rights of 1789.
