hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.  It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also....  A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.”  But Marshall was mighty and his view prevailed, though from time to time other men, clinging to Jefferson’s opinion, likewise opposed the exercise by the Courts of the high power of passing upon the constitutionality of acts of Congress.

=Acts of State Legislatures Declared Unconstitutional.=—­Had Marshall stopped with annulling an act of Congress, he would have heard less criticism from Republican quarters; but, with the same firmness, he set aside acts of state legislatures as well, whenever, in his opinion, they violated the federal Constitution.  In 1810, in the case of Fletcher vs. Peck, he annulled an act of the Georgia legislature, informing the state that it was not sovereign, but “a part of a large empire, ... a member of the American union; and that union has a constitution ... which imposes limits to the legislatures of the several states.”  In the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland, decided in 1819, he declared void an act of the Maryland legislature designed to paralyze the branches of the United States Bank established in that state.  In the same year, in the still more memorable Dartmouth College case, he annulled an act of the New Hampshire legislature which infringed upon the charter received by the college from King George long before.  That charter, he declared, was a contract between the state and the college, which the legislature under the federal Constitution could not impair.  Two years later he stirred the wrath of Virginia by summoning her to the bar of the Supreme Court to answer in a case in which the validity of one of her laws was involved and then justified his action in a powerful opinion rendered in the case of Cohens vs. Virginia.

All these decisions aroused the legislatures of the states.  They passed sheaves of resolutions protesting and condemning; but Marshall never turned and never stayed.  The Constitution of the United States, he fairly thundered at them, is the supreme law of the land; the Supreme Court is the proper tribunal to pass finally upon the validity of the laws of the states; and “those sovereignties,” far from possessing the right of review and nullification, are irrevocably bound by the decisions of that Court.  This was strong medicine for the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and for the members of the Hartford convention; but they had to take it.