The judiciary was the next department of the proposed plan of government that remained to be provided. Like the executive, it was a branch of sovereign power unknown to the Confederation. The most palpable defect of that government, as I have more than once had occasion to observe, was the entire want of sanction to its laws. It had no judicial system of its own for decree and execution against individuals. All its legislation, both in nature and form, prescribed duties to States. The observance of these duties could only be enforced against the parties on whom they rested, and this could be done only by military power. But it was the peculiar and anomalous situation of the American Confederacy, that the power to employ force against its delinquent members had not been expressly delegated to it by the Articles of Union; and that it could not be implied from the general purposes and provisions of that instrument, without a seeming infraction of the article by which the States had reserved to themselves every power, jurisdiction, and right not "expressly" delegated to the United States. If this objection was well founded,--and it was universally held to be so,--we may well concur in the remark of The Federalist, that "the United States presented the extraordinary spectacle of a government destitute even of the shadow of constitutional power to enforce the execution of its own laws."[36] The Confederation, too, had found it to be entirely impracticable to rely on the tribunals of the States for the execution of its laws. Such a reliance in a confederated government presupposes that the party guilty of an infraction of the laws or ordinances of the confederacy will try, condemn, and punish itself. The whole history of our Confederation evinces the futility of laws requiring the obedience of States, and proceeding upon the expectation that they will enforce that obedience upon themselves.