What, also, are we to think of all the judges,--forty in all,--his associates and successors, who, for eighty years, have been telling the people that the government has all power, and the people no rights? Have they all been mere blockheads, who never read this amendment, or knew nothing of its meaning? Or have they, too, been perjured tyrants and traitors? What, too, becomes of those great constitutional lawyers, as we have called them, who have been supposed to have won such immortal honors, as "expounders of the constitution," but who seem never to have discovered in it any security for men's natural rights? Is their apparent ignorance, on this point, to be accounted for by the fact, that that portion of the people, who, by authority of the government, are systematically robbed of all their earnings, beyond a bare subsistence, are not able to pay such fees as are the robbers who are authorized to plunder them? If any one will now look back to the records of congress and the courts, for the last eighty years, I do not think he will find a single mention of this amendment. And why has this been so? Solely because the amendment--if its authority had been recognized--would have stood as an insuperable barrier against all the ambition and rapacity--all the arbitrary power, all the plunder, and all the tyranny--which the ambitious and rapacious classes have determined to accomplish through the agency of the government. The fact that these classes have been so successful in perverting the constitution (thus amended) from an instrument avowedly securing all men's natural rights, into an authority for utterly destroying them, is a sufficient proof that no lawmaking power can be safely intrusted to any body, for any purpose whatever. And that this perversion of the constitution should have been sanctioned by all the judicial tribunals of the country, is also a proof, not only of the servility, audacity, and villainy of the judges, but also of the utter rottenness of our judicial system. It is a sufficient proof that judges, who are dependent upon lawmakers for their offices and salaries, and are responsible to them by impeachment, cannot be relied on to put the least restraint upon the acts of their masters, the lawmakers. Such, then, would have been the effect of the ninth amendment, if it had been permitted to have its legitimate authority. SECTION XXVI. The tenth amendment is in these words: The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, _or to the people_. This amendment, equally with the ninth, secures to "the people" all their natural rights. And why? Because, in truth, no powers at all, neither legislative, judicial, nor executive, had been "delegated to the United States by the constitution."