I said and I repeat that while lawyers, and because we are lawyers, we are statesmen. We are by profession statesmen. And who may measure the value of this department of public duty? Doubtless in statesmanship there are many mansions, and large variety of conspicuous service. Doubtless to have wisely decided the question of war or peace,--to have adjusted by a skillful negotiation a thousand miles of unsettled boundary-line,--to have laid the corner-stone of some vast policy whereby the currency is corrected, the finances enriched, the measure of industrial fame filled,--are large achievements. And yet I do not know that I can point to one achievement of this department of American statesmanship which can take rank for its consequences of good above that single decision of the Supreme Court which adjudged that an act of legislature contrary to the Constitution is void, and that the judicial department is clothed with the power to ascertain the repugnancy and to pronounce the legal conclusion. That the framers of the Constitution intended this should be so is certain; but to have asserted it against the Congress and the Executive,--to have vindicated it by that easy yet adamantine demonstration than which the reasonings of the mathematics show nothing surer,--to have inscribed this vast truth of conservatism on the public mind, so that no demagogue, not in the last stage of intoxication, denies it,--this is an achievement of statesmanship of which a thousand years may not exhaust or reveal all the good. DANIEL WEBSTER From Eulogy delivered at Dartmouth College, 1853