When the advocates of these doctrines were asked to remember the state of public opinion at the time when the Constitution was framed; the jealousy which then existed and had for so many years existed, of the power of the General Government; the fact that the apprehensions which had been entertained had so long prevented the calling of a Convention; the extreme improbability that the Convention, under such circumstances, could have intended to give to Congress the power to pass any law it might be pleased to regard as useful in the execution of an enumerated power, whatever might be its bearing upon the State governments; to add to the power to make peace and war and to raise armies and equip fleets; to make the power to raise money unlimited by authorizing its expenditure upon any measure Congress might assume to be conducive to the common defense and general welfare, and the absurdity of the supposition that the grant of such far-reaching and absorbing powers would have been conferred in so obscure a way, and that the Constitution would have passed the scrutiny of so many State Conventions without its ever having been intimated in any way that there lay concealed in its general terms grants of power which, if but suspected, would have set the country in a blaze, and would have produced instant refusals to ratify on the part of most of the States,--when such considerations were opposed to those bold pretensions, the only reply was, the Constitution must be construed by its letter, and we cannot look behind it or beside it for the means of doing so truly. To the answer that extraneous matter has always been allowed by all laws, state and national, to be used in the interpretation of the highest acts of sovereignty, such as the construction of treaties between sovereign powers, of patents issued under the great seal, of acts of Parliament, of Congress, and of State legislatures, and in respect to the latter class the old law, the mischief and the proposed remedy to be taken into consideration in searching for the meaning of such acts, in the construction of wills, deeds, &c., &c., the only rejoinder was that a Constitution was an exception to those rules; in short that a Constitution was the sole exception to the application of the maxim which has grown out of the observation and experience of mankind,--_qui hæret in literâ hæret in cortice_.