Is the situation necessarily different when a court is asked to enforce a legislative act? The courts are not strangers to the case of political questions, where they must refuse to interfere with the acts of the other departments,--as in the case relating to Andrew Johnson just referred to; and in dealing with what are construed to be merely directory provisions of the Constitution; and with the cases, well approved in the Supreme Court of the United States, where courts refuse to consider whether provisions of a constitution have been complied with, which require certain formalities in passing laws,--accepting as final the certificate of the officers of the political departments. A question, passed upon by those departments, is thus refused any discussion in the judicial forum, on the ground, to quote the language of the Supreme Court, that “the respect due to coequal and independent departments requires the judicial department to act upon this assurance.” So far as any necessary conclusion is concerned, it might fairly have been said, with us, as it is said in Europe, that the real question in all these cases is not whether the act is constitutional, but whether its constitutionality can properly be brought in question before a given tribunal. Could Marshall have had to deal with this great question, in answer to Chief Justice Gibson’s powerful opinion in Eakin _v._ Raub, in 1825,[37] instead of deciding it without being helped or hindered by any adverse argument at all, as he did, we should have had a far higher exhibition of his powers than the case now affords.[38] CHAPTER V THE WORKING OF OUR SYSTEM OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW I have drawn attention to the immense service that Chief Justice Marshall rendered to his country in the field of constitutional law, and have considered a few of the cases. Since his time not twice the length of his term of thirty-four years has gone by, but more than five times the number of volumes that sufficed for the opinions of the Supreme Court during his period is required for those of his successors on the bench. Nor does even that proportion indicate the increase in the quantity of the court’s business which is referable to this particular part of the law. It has enormously increased. When one reflects upon the multitude, variety, and complexity of the questions relating to the regulation of interstate commerce, upon the portentous and ever increasing flood of litigation to which the Fourteenth Amendment has given rise; upon the new problems in business, government, and police which have come in with steam and electricity, and their ten thousand applications; upon the growth of corporations and of wealth, the changes of opinion on social questions, such as the relation of capital and labor, and upon the recent expansions of our control over great and distant islands,--we seem to be living in a different world from Marshall’s.