In most of Marshall’s opinions, one observes the style and special touch of a thoughtful and original mind; in some of them the powers of a great mind, in full activity. His cases relating to international law, as I am assured by those competent to judge, rank with the best there are in the books. As regards most of the more familiar titles of the law, it would be too much to claim for him the very first rank. In that region he is, in many respects, equaled or surpassed by men more deeply versed in the learning and technicalities of the law, in what constitutes that “artificial perfection of reason” which Coke used to glorify as far transcending any man’s natural reason,--men such as Story, Kent, or Shaw, or even the reformer, Mansfield, whom he greatly admired, Eldon, or Blackburn. But in the field of constitutional law, a region not open to an English lawyer,--and especially in one department of it, that relating to the nature and scope of the National Constitution, he was preëminent,--first, with no one second. It is hardly possible, as regards this part of the law, to say too much of the service he rendered to his country. Sitting in the highest judicial place for more than a generation; familiar, from the beginning, with the Federal Constitution, with the purposes of its framers, and with all the objections of its critics; accustomed to meet these objections from the time he had served in the Virginia Convention of 1788; convinced of the purpose and capacity of this instrument to create a strong nation, competent to make itself respected at home and abroad, and able to speak with the voice and strike with the strength of all; assured that this was the paramount necessity of the country, and that the great source of danger was in the jealousies and adverse interests of the States,--Marshall acted on his convictions. He determined to give full effect to all the affirmative contributions of power that went to make up a great and efficient national government; and fully, also, to enforce the national restraints and prohibitions upon the States. In both cases he included not only the powers expressed in the Constitution, but those also which should be found, as time unfolded, to be fairly and clearly implied in the objects for which the federal government was established. In that long judicial life, with which Providence blessed him, and blessed his country, he was able to lay down, in a succession of cases, the fundamental considerations which fix and govern the relative functions of the nation and the States, so plainly, with such fullness, with such simplicity and strength of argument, such a candid allowance for all that was to be said upon the other side, in a tone so removed from controversial bitterness, so natural and fit for a great man addressing the “serene reason” of mankind, as to commend these things to the minds of his countrymen, and firmly to fix them in the jurisprudence of the nation; so that “when the rain descended and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, it fell not, because it was founded upon a rock.” It was Marshall’s strong constitutional doctrine, explained in detail, elaborated, powerfully argued, over and over again, with unsurpassable earnestness and force, placed permanently in our judicial records, holding its own during the long emergence of a feebler political theory, and showing itself in all its majesty when war and civil dissension came,--it was largely this that saved the country from succumbing, in the great struggle of forty years ago, and kept our political fabric from going to pieces.