The decisions reached in Fletcher vs. Peck and Dartmouth College vs. Woodward are important episodes in a significant phase of American constitutional history. Partly on account of the lack of distinction between legislative and judicial power and partly on account of the influence of the notion of parliamentary sovereignty, legislative bodies at the close of the eighteenth century were the sources of much anonymous and corporate despotism. Even in England as well as in this country the value, and indeed the possibility, of representative institutions had been frankly challenged in the name of liberty. For the United States the problem of making legislative power livable and tolerable--a problem made the more acute by the multiplicity of legislative bodies--was partly solved by the establishment of judicial review. But this was only the first step: legislative power had still to be defined and confined. Marshall's audacity in invoking generally recognized moral principles against legislative sovereignty in his interpretation of the "obligation of contracts" clause pointed the way to the American judiciaries for the discharge of their task of defining legislative power. The final result is to be seen today in the Supreme Court's concept of the police power of a State as a power not of arbitrary but of reasonable legislation. While Marshall was performing this service in behalf of representative government, he was also aiding the cause of nationalism by accustoming certain types of property to look upon the National Government as their natural champion against the power of the States. In this connection it should also be recalled that Gibbons vs. Ogden and Brown vs. Maryland had advanced the principle of the exclusiveness of Congress's power over foreign and interstate commerce. Under the shelter of this interpretation there developed, in the railroad and transportation business of the country before the Civil War, a property interest almost as extensive as that which supported the doctrine of State Rights. Nor can it be well doubted that Marshall designed some such result or that he aimed to prompt the reflection voiced by King of Massachusetts on the floor of the Federal Convention. "He was filled with astonishment that, if we were convinced that every man in America was secured in all his rights, we should be ready to sacrifice this substantial good to the phantom of state sovereignty." Lastly, these decisions brought a certain theoretical support to the Union. Marshall himself did not regard the Constitution as a compact between the States; if a compact at all, it was a compact among individuals, a social compact. But a great and increasing number of his countrymen took the other view. How unsafe, then, it would have been from the standpoint of one concerned for the integrity of the Union, to distinguish public contracts from private on the ground that the former, in the view of the Constitution, had less obligation! CHAPTER VII