Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/489

OUR NEW POSSESSIONS. 469 tion are revealed, and that this great instrument shows itself wiser and niofe far-looking than men had thought. It is forever dwarf- ing its commentators, both statesmen and judges, by disclosing its own greatness. In the entire list of the judges of our highest court, past and present, in the business of interpreting the Con- stitution, few indeed are the men who have not, now and again, signally failed to appreciate the large scope of this great charter of our national life. Petty judicial interpretations have always been, are now, and always will be, a very serious danger to the country. As regards the Constitution, let me say one or two things more. A great deal is said, and rightly said, as to the limitations in the grants of power to the geileral government. Doubtless this Constitution is essentially different from those of the States, in that the provisions of the latter affect a government which has all power, except so far as the State has parted with any of it to the United States, or as it is withheld by the State constitution itself. On the other hand, the United States did not begin with any such reservoir of power; it had and has only what is granted in the Federal Constitution for the general purposes. But these granted powers, while limited in number, are supreme, full, and abso- lute in their reach, subject only to any specific abatements made in the Constitution itself The situation brought about by the remarkable transaction of a century ago, when our States com- bined to create the United States, may be truly conceived of as the setting up of a single great power, which, for certain general ends should be, to each one of the States, its other half. In each State, if you look about for the total contents of sovereign power, you find a part of it, the local part, in the State, and the rest of it in the general government. Each holds the same relation to this common government; each has contributed to it the same pro- portion of its total stock; so that at the end of your search you find, as regards certain of the chief governmental functions — for example the war power and the power of dealing with foreign na- tions — that there is but one government in the country, and that, so far as these particular functions are concerned, it is as sover- eign as each State was before it parted with its powers; just as sovereign as regards these immense and far-reaching functions and for all the purposes that they involve, as any one of the great nations of the world. If you ask what this nation may do in prosecuting the ends for which it was created, the answer is, It may do what other sovereign nations may do. In creating this