In the very early days of the Supreme Court, this knowledge of the “convention” days was echoed in decisions which, _on that ground_, held that certain taxes, which today might be regarded as direct taxation, were not within the federal limitation as to apportionment of direct taxes among the states. Among those taxes, those imposed without apportionment, were a tax on carriages and receipts of insurance companies and on the inheritance of real estate. Even as late as the days of the Civil War, when a tax was imposed upon incomes and without apportionment among states, the Supreme Court held that such tax was not a direct tax within the meaning of “direct tax” to those who imposed the federal limitation. Nevertheless, when the income tax law of 1894 had been enacted, its opponents again carried to the Supreme Court the claim that it violated the federal limitation on the power of direct taxation, because it did not apportion the tax among the states. And the Supreme Court, by a divided vote and on the ground that a tax on the income from land was a tax on the land itself and consequently a direct tax, held the Income Tax Law of 1894 to be void. It was by reason of this decision that the Sixteenth Amendment was proposed and adopted, making the _federal_ change in the Constitution that lifted the _federal_ limitation from the national power of direct taxation insofar as a tax on incomes was concerned. In these decisions, as in the many others which have followed the same clear American concept of duty and power, the Supreme Court has always known and followed the reason stated by Hamilton for its existence as part of the _limited_ government of the one American people. In _Federalist_, Nos. 78 and 81, appealing to the Americans to make the Constitution, Hamilton points out that the Constitution does not authorize the Supreme Court to exercise its will to make the law what the Court thinks it _ought to be_, but does impose upon the Court the duty of exercising its judgment to ascertain what the law _has been made_ by those competent to make it. And then he points out that the Supreme Court, in this Constitution of a self-governing people, is made the great bulwark of the people against legislative encroachment upon the rights or powers of the people reserved to themselves. This knowledge of Hamilton has been the knowledge of the Supreme Court from its institution. It has been reiterated and explained and expounded in that Court from the days of Marshall to our own day. It has become part and parcel of the great traditions of that Court, which are the foundation of the great respect which the average American citizen pays to its decisions and its authority as his own great protection against usurpation of power by other departments of his various governments.