It was early in Marshall’s day that the Supreme Court first took the grave step of disregarding an act of Congress,--a coördinate department,--which conflicted with the National Constitution. The right to deal thus with their legislatures had already been asserted in the States, and once or twice it had really been exercised. Had the question related to a conflict between that Constitution and the enactment of a State, it would have been a simpler matter. These two questions, under European written constitutions, are regarded as different ones. It is almost necessary to the working of a federal system that the general government, and each of its departments, should be free to disregard acts of any department of the local states which may be inconsistent with the federal constitution. And so in Switzerland and Germany the federal courts thus treat local enactments. But there is not under any written constitution in Europe a country where a court deals in this way with the act of its coördinate legislature. In Germany, at one time, this was done, under the influence of a study of our law, but it was soon abandoned.[21] In the colonial period, while we were dependencies of Great Britain, our legislation was subject to the terms of the royal charters. Enactments were often disallowed by the English Privy Council, sometimes acting as mere revisers of the colonial legislation, and sometimes as appellate judicial tribunals. Our people were, in this way, familiar with the theory of a dependent legislature, one whose action was subject to reversal by judicial authority, as contrary to the terms of a written charter of government. When, therefore, after the war of independence, our new sovereign, namely, ourselves, the people, came to substitute for the old royal charters the people’s charters, what we call our “constitutions,”--it was natural to expect some legal restraint upon legislation. It was not always found in terms; indeed, it was at first hardly ever, if at all, found set down in words. But it was a natural and just interpretation of these instruments, made in regions with such a history as ours and growing out of the midst of such ideas and such an experience, to think that courts, in the regular exercise of their functions, that is to say, in dealing with litigated cases, could treat the constitutions as law to be applied by them in determining the validity of legislation.