In 1812, when a change took place, the court had been for a year without a quorum. Moreover, Judge Story had just come to the bench, a man of quite too exuberant an intellect and temperament to work well as a silent side-judge. We remark, also, at the beginning of that term, that the Chief Justice was not in attendance, having, as the reporter tells us, “received an injury by the oversetting of the stage-coach on his journey from Richmond.” And it may be added that just at this time the anxious prayer of Jefferson was answered, and a majority of the judges were Republicans. From whatever cause, henceforward there was a change; and without returning to the old habit of _seriatim_ opinions, the side-judges had their turn, as they do now. In most of Marshall’s opinions, one observes the style and special touch of a thoughtful and original mind; in some of them the powers of a great mind, in full activity. His cases relating to international law, as I am assured by those competent to judge, rank with the best there are in the books. As regards most of the more familiar titles of the law, it would be too much to claim for him the very first rank. In that region he is, in many respects, equaled or surpassed by men more deeply versed in the learning and technicalities of the law, in what constitutes that “artificial perfection of reason” which Coke used to glorify as far transcending any man’s natural reason,--men such as Story, Kent, or Shaw, or even the reformer, Mansfield, whom he greatly admired, Eldon, or Blackburn. But in the field of constitutional law, a region not open to an English lawyer,--and especially in one department of it, that relating to the nature and scope of the National Constitution, he was preëminent,--first, with no one second. It is hardly possible, as regards this part of the law, to say too much of the service he rendered to his country. Sitting in the highest judicial place for more than a generation; familiar, from the beginning, with the Federal Constitution, with the purposes of its framers, and with all the objections of its critics; accustomed to meet these objections from the time he had served in the Virginia Convention of 1788; convinced of the purpose and capacity of this instrument to create a strong nation, competent to make itself respected at home and abroad, and able to speak with the voice and strike with the strength of all; assured that this was the paramount necessity of the country, and that the great source of danger was in the jealousies and adverse interests of the States,--Marshall acted on his convictions. He determined to give full effect to all the affirmative contributions of power that went to make up a great and efficient national government; and fully, also, to enforce the national restraints and prohibitions upon the States. In both cases he included not only the powers expressed in the Constitution, but those also which should be found, as time unfolded, to be fairly and clearly implied in