The high power has been conferred upon this Court of passing judgment upon the acts of the state sovereignties and of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, of determining whether they are beyond the limits of power marked out for them respectively by the Constitution of the United States. (Luther v. Borden, 1849, 7 _How._ 1 at p. 47.) The Court will never be called upon to exercise a higher or graver trust than to answer the question “Citizen or Subject?”, when the real challenge is made to the new attempted constitution of government of men entirely by government. The Court is not unaware that the whole American people established their Constitution for the one purpose of protecting individual liberty. The simple, classical, precise, yet comprehensive language in which it is couched, leaves, at most, but very little latitude for construction; and when its intent and meaning is discovered, nothing remains but to execute the will of those who made it, in the best manner to effect the purposes intended. The great and paramount purpose was to unite this mass of wealth and power, for the protection of the humblest individual; his rights, civil and political, his interests and prosperity, are the sole _end_; the rest are nothing but the _means_. (Justice Johnson, Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 _Wheat._ 1, at p. 223.) Nor will anyone familiar with the unbroken tradition of the Supreme Court listen, with aught but mingled incredulity and indignation, to the suggestion that the Court itself has not always understood that it is itself but a part of the _limited_ government of the one American people, created by that people as one means to that sole end. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judiciary Department to say what the law _is_.” This is the clear statement of Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, 1 _Cranch._ 137, declaring unconstitutional a section of an act of Congress, which had been passed at the first session in 1789. The entire Bench and Bar of America, including the Supreme Court, for fourteen years, had practiced on the assumption that the section was constitutional. Yet in 1803, the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional. Nothing could more clearly establish the knowledge of the Supreme Court that no continued thought (even by the Court itself), that any command of legislatures is valid, will ever blind the Court to its bounden duty to announce the fact that the command was made without authority from the people, when that fact is once made clear to the Court. Exactly the same attitude was taken by the Court in relation to an income tax and a _federal_ limitation on a _national_ power given to impose direct taxation. When that federal limitation was imposed it was aimed only at taxation on land and at what were then known as “poll” or “capitation” taxes. In the days of the “conventions” where we have sat, all other kinds of taxation were deemed to be indirect taxation.