bound to respect. Happily, time has to a great extent corrected this great injustice, and there are few now who do not acknowledge the purity and probity of the character of this great jurist, and admit that he stands among the very greatest of the great men who have adorned the Supreme Bench of the United States. While the opinion in this case is of some length, the Chief Justice stated the issue and its inevitable conclusion in a few sentences so clearly that I cannot refrain from quoting them.
"If the judicial power exercised (by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin) in this instance has been reserved to the States, no offense against the laws of the United States can be punished by their own courts without the permission and according to the judgment of the Court of the State in which the party happens to be imprisoned; for if the Supreme Court of Wisconsin possessed the power it has exercised in relation to offenses against the action of Congress in question, it necessarily follows that they must have the same judicial authority in relation to any other law of the United States, and consequently their supremacy and controlling power would embrace the whole criminal code of the United States and extend to offenses against our revenue laws or any other law intended to guard the different departments of the general government from fraud or violence, and it would embrace all crimes from the highest to the lowest, including felonies, which are punished with death, as well as misdemeanors which are punished by imprisonment. And if this power is possessed by the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin, it must belong equally to every other State in the Union when the prisoner is within its territorial limits; and it is very certain that the State courts would not always agree in opinion, and it would often happen that an act which was admitted to be an offense and justly punished in one State, would be regarded as innocent and indeed as praiseworthy in another. It seems to be hardly necesesary to do more than state the result to which these decisions of the State Courts must necessarily lead. It is, of itself, a sufficient and conclusive answer; for no one will suppose that a government which was now lasted nearly seventy years, enforcing its laws by its own tribunals and preserving the
