VOL. XIII.
No. 5.
BOSTON.
JOHN
MAY, 1901.
MARSHALL,
II. JUDGE AND JURIST. IF it be trae, as was said by one of his friends, that a truly great Judge belongs to an age of political liberty and public moral ity, and is the representative of the abstract justice of the people, it is equally true that when John Marshall was made Chief Justice the age and the occasion and the great Judge came together.1 If I were to think of John Marshall simply by number and measure in the abstract, I might hesitate in my superlatives, just as I should hesitate over the battle of Brandywine if I thought of it apart from its place in the line of historic cause. But such think ing is empty in the same proportion that it is abstract. It is most idle to take a man apart from the circumstances which in fact were his. To be sure, it is easier in fancy to separate a person from his riches than from his character. But it is just as futile. Remove a square inch of mucous mem brane and the tenor will sing no more. Re move a little cube from the brain and the orator will be speechless; or another, and the brave, generous and profound spirit be comes a timid and querulous trifler. A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there. I no more can separate John Mar shall from the fortunate circumstance that the appointment of Chief Justice fell to John 'Honorable William Lindsay, United States Senator from Kentucky.
Adams, instead of to Jefferson a month later, and so gave it to a Federalist and loose constructionist to start the working of the Con stitution, than I can separate the black line through which he sent his electric fire at Fort Wagner from Colonel Shaw. When we celebrate Marshall, we celebrate at the same lime and indivisibiy the inevitable fact that the oneness of the nation and the supremacy of the national Constitution were declared to govern the dealings of man with man, by the judgments and decrees of the most au gust of courts. I do not mean, of course, that personal estimates are useless or teach us nothing. No doubt today there will be heard from able and competent persons such estimates of Mar shall. . . . My own impressions are only those which I have gathered in the common course of legal education and practice. In them I am conscious perhaps of some little revolt from our purely local or national esti mates, and of a wish to see things and people judged by more cosmopolitan standards. A man is bound to be parochial in his practice — to give his life and, if necessary, his death, for the place where he has his roots. But his thinking should be cosmopolitan and de tached. He should be able to criticise what he reveres and loves. "The Federalist," when I read it many years ago, seemed to me a truly original and won derful production of the time. I do not trust even that judgment tmrevised when I re member that "The Federalist" and its authors struck a distinguished English friend of
